He would be an old man—an old man before he could dream of marrying. His mother, after all, was only sixty, and she came of a long-lived family. Her apparent fragility was an illusion; she had never had a day’s illness as long as he could remember. Nerves like whipcord, young arteries, and every organ sound. She would live ten—fifteen—twenty years longer, live to be eighty. He was thirty-five now, and Effie was twenty-five. Before they could marry, they would be fifty-five and forty-five; old, old; too old to feel, to care passionately. He had no right to ask Effie to wait twenty years for him. He must give up thinking about her. His mother was still in her chair by the drawing-room fire, waiting for him. She turned as he came to her, and held up her face to be kissed, like a child, he thought, or like a young wife waiting for her husband. She put her hands on his hair and stroked it. And he remembered the time when he used to say to her: “I shall never marry. You’re all the wife I want, Mother.” And now it was as if he had been calculating on her death. But he hadn’t. He hadn’t. You couldn’t calculate on anything so far-off, so unlikely. He had done the only possible, the only decent thing. He had given Effie up. II The doctor had gone. Hollyer went back into his mother’s room. She lay there, dozing, in the big white bed, propped high on the pillows. Through her mouth, piteously open, he could hear her short quick breath, struggling and gasping. [Illustration] The illness had lasted nine days. Even now Hollyer hadn’t got used to it. He still looked at the figure in the bed with the same stare of shocked incredulity. It was still incredible that his mother’s influenza should have turned to pleurisy, that she should lie like that, utterly abandoned, the neat pile of her hair undone, and her face, with its open mouth, loose and infirm between the two white loops that hung askew, rumpled by the pillow. He knew in a vague way how it had happened. First his own attack of influenza, then his mother’s. His had been pretty bad, but hers had been slight, so slight that it had not been recognized, and through it she had still nursed him. Then she had gone out too soon, in the raw January weather. And now the doctor came morning and evening; she had a trained nurse for the night, and Hollyer looked after her all day. He had got used to the nurse. Her expensive presence proved to him that he had nothing to reproach himself with; he had done, as they said, everything that could be done.