slipped away through the door which stood half open. He jumped up
and ran after her; there she lay on the sofa, sobbing. She felt
that he was behind her, she raised herself quickly, and, still
sobbing, pressed him to her heart.

Even when they stood together beside the body, the hand which he
had in his shook so that he threw his arms round her, thinking
that she would fall.

Later in life, when he recalled this, he understood what she had
silently endured, what an unbending will she had brought to the
struggle, but also what it had cost her.

At the time he did not in the least comprehend it. He imagined
that she suffered from the horror of the moment as he himself did.

There lay the giant, in wretchedness and squalor! He who had once
boasted of his cleanliness, and expected the like in others, lay
there, dirty and unshaven, under dirty bed clothes, in linen so
ragged and filthy that no workman on the estate had worse. The
clothes which he had worn the day before lay on a chair beside the
bed, miserably threadbare, foul with dirt, sweat, and tobacco, and
stinking like everything else. His mouth was distorted, his hands
tightly clenched; he had died of a stroke.

And how forlorn and desolate was all around him! Why had his son
never noticed this before? Why had he never felt that his father
was lonely and forsaken? To how great an extent no words could
express.