The familiar bedroom was not familiar any longer; it looked strange and austere as Joan entered. The blinds were down, flapping in the draught from the windows. A large fire blazing in the grate added to the sense of something important and portentous that hung about the place. On the bed lay a strange figure; someone whom Joan felt she had never seen before. Its face was unnaturally pale and shrunken and so were the wandering hands extended on the coverlet. This stranger moaned incessantly, and turned his head from side to side; his eyes were open and blank. Joan took one of the wandering hands in hers: "Father!" she said softly. He looked through her and beyond, breathing with an effort. A quiet tap came on the door and the nurse, hastily summoned from the Cottage Hospital, came in. She was a pink-faced, competent-looking girl, and wore her cloak and bonnet. She took in the situation at a glance. "I'll just take off my things," she said, "and be back in a minute." Presently the doctor came again. He said very little, and pressing Mrs. Ogden's limp hand, departed. The nurse, now in charge, had rendered the bedroom still more unfamiliar, with her temperature chart, and a table covered with a clean white towel, upon which she had set out strange little appliances that they did not know the use of. When she spoke she did so in a loud whisper, glancing ever and anon towards the figure on the bed. Her cuffs creaked and so did her shoes. A smell of disinfectant was everywhere; they wondered what it was, it was unfriendly, but no one dared to question this empress ruling over the kingdom of Death. The colonel belonged to her now; they all felt it, and submitted without a protest. He was hers to do as she pleased with, to turn in the bed or to leave in discomfort, to raise up or lay down. She it was who moistened his lips with cotton wool, soaked in a solution of her own making. Sometimes she opened his mouth and moistened his tongue as well. He lay there utterly helpless and unable to protest, while she subjected him to countless necessary indignities. Her trained hands, hard and deft, permitted of no resistance, doing their work quietly and without emotion. It seemed horrible to Joan to see him brought so low, but she, like the rest of the household, stood back respectfully, bowing to the realization that only three beings had any control over her father now: the doctor, the nurse--and Death. Just before he died, on the afternoon of the fifth day, he knew his wife and called her: "Mary!" His voice was unexpectedly loud. She went and put her arms round him. "Mary!" "Yes, James?" "I'm going to die--it's funny my going to die--wish I knew more about it." "Hush, dearest, don't talk." "Mary." "Yes, James?" "Sorry--if I've been hard on you--but you see----" "Hush, my dear, you mustn't try to talk." But the colonel had ceased to try to do anything any more in this world. CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR 1