While he lay on the bed, flat, his arms out, like a prisoner on a rack, wondering why all his thoughts had become a void in which he could find no words with which to answer her, she slowly stood up, turned out the gas, then again opened the gas-cock. She hastily stripped off her overcoat and fitted it over the crack at the bottom of the door, where showed a strip of light from the slimy hall without. She caught up the red cotton table-cloth and stuffed it along the window, moving clumsily through the room, in which the darkness was broken only by pallid light that seeped through the window from cold walls without. She staggered over and lay down beside him. Her work was done, and in the darkness her worried frown changed to a smile of divine and mothering kindliness which did not lessen as a thin, stinging, acid vapor of illuminating gas bit at her throat and made her cough. Father raised his head in stupefied alarm. She drew him down, put his head on her shoulder. She took his hand, to lead him, her little boy, into a land of summer dreams where they would always be together. The Innocents were going their way, asking no one's permission, yet harming no one.... His hand was twitching a little; he coughed with a sound of hurt bewilderment; but she held his hand firmly, and over this first rough part of the road the mother of tenderness led him pityingly on. CHAPTER XII Out of a black curdled ocean where for ages he had struggled and stifled, Seth Appleby raised his head for an instant, and sank again. For longer ages, and more black, more terrible, he fought on the bottom of the ocean of life. He had reached the bottom now. He began to rise. His coughing was shaking him into a half-consciousness, and very dimly he heard her cough, too. He feverishly threw out one hand. It struck the mouth-organ he had thrown upon the bed, struck it sharply, with a pain that pierced to his nerve-centers. He had the dismaying thought, "I'll never play the mouth-organ to her again.... We won't ever sit in the rose-arbor while I play the mouth-organ to her. Where is she? Yes! Yes! This is her hand." He was trying to think now. Something said to him, sharply, "Suicide is wicked." Yes, he reflected, in the tangles of a half-thought, he had always been told that suicide was wicked. Let's see. What was it he was trying to think--suicide wicked--blame the cowards who killed themselves--suicide wicked-- No, no! That wasn't the thought he was trying to lay hold of. What was it he was trying to think? Suicide wicked-- God, how this cough hurt him. What was it-- Suicide? No! He violently pushed away the thought of suicide and its wickedness, and at last shouted, within himself: "Oh, that's what I was thinking! I must play to Mother again! Where is she? She needs me. She's 'way off somewhere; she's helpless; she's calling for me--my poor little girl."