Her daughter clenched her fists with anger at it. But hearing a sound of stertorous breathing, she tiptoed across the room and looked behind the screen. There Mrs. Melville was lying on her back in a narrow iron bedstead. Her head was turned away, so that nothing of it could be seen but a thin grey plait trailing across the pillow, but her body seemed to have shrunk, and hardly raised the bedclothes. Ellen went to the side of the bed and knelt so that she might look into the hidden face, and was for a second terrified to find herself caught in the wide beam of two glaring open eyes that seemed much larger than her mother's had ever been. All that dear face was changed. The skin was glazed and pink, and about the gaping mouth, out of which they had taken the false teeth, there was a wandering blueness which seemed to come and go with the slow, roaring breath. Ellen fell back in a sitting posture and looked for Richard, whom she had forgotten, and who was now standing at the end of the bed. She stretched out her hands to him and moaned; and at that sound recognition stirred in the centre of Mrs. Melville's immense glazed gaze, like a small waking bird ruffling its feathers on some inmost branch of a large tree. "Oh, mother dear! Mother dear!" From that roaring throat came a tortured, happy noise; and she tried to make her lips meet, and speak. "My wee lamb, don't try to speak. Just lie quiet. It's heaven just to be with you. You needn't speak." But Mrs. Melville fought to say it. Something had struck her as so remarkable that she was willing to spend one of her last breaths commenting on it. They both bent forward eagerly to hear it. She whispered: "Nice to have a room of one's own."