She closed her eyes in token that the brief audience was over. Again she was vexed by the tickling cough that threatened to grow more pronounced. "I am ready, Dick," she said faintly, still with closed eyes. "I want to make my sleepy, sleepy noise. Is the doctor ready? Come closer. Hold my hand like you did before in the little death." She turned her eyes to Graham, and Dick did not look, for he knew love was in that last look of hers, as he knew it would be when she looked into his eyes at the last. "Once," she explained to Graham, "I had to go on the table, and I made Dick go with me into the anaesthetic chamber and hold my hand until I went under. You remember, Henley called it the drunken dark, the little death in life. It was very easy." In the silence she continued her look, then turned her face and eyes back to Dick, who knelt close to her, holding her hand. With a pressure of her fingers on his and a beckoning of her eyes, she drew his ear down to her lips. "Red Cloud," she whispered, "I love you best. And I am proud I belonged to you for such a long, long time." Still closer she drew him with the pressure of her fingers. "I'm sorry there were no babies, Red Cloud." With the relaxing of her fingers she eased him from her so that she could look from one to the other. "Two bonnie, bonnie men. Good-by, bonnie men. Good-by, Red Cloud." In the pause, they waited, while the doctor bared her arm for the needle. "Sleepy, sleepy," she twittered in mimicry of drowsy birds. "I am ready, doctor. Stretch the skin tight, first. You know I don't like to be hurt.--Hold me tight, Dick." Robinson, receiving the eye permission from Dick, easily and quickly thrust the needle through the stretched skin, with steady hand sank the piston home, and with the ball of the finger soothingly rubbed the morphine into circulation. "Sleepy, sleepy, boo'ful sleepy," she murmured drowsily, after a time. Semi-consciously she half-turned on her side, curved her free arm on the pillow and nestled her head on it, and drew her body up in nestling curves in the way Dick knew she loved to sleep. After a long time, she sighed faintly, and began so easily to go that she was gone before they guessed. From without, the twittering of the canaries bathing in the fountain penetrated the silence of the room, and from afar came the trumpeting of Mountain Lad and the silver whinny of the Fotherington Princess. THE END End of Project Gutenberg's The Little Lady of the Big House, by Jack London