Inside the hovel there was a smoke-stained fireplace beside which was
strewn an armful of faggots. There was before it a number of broken and
greasy dishes, filled with fragments of food. And all about on the floor
lay the litter of the sick-room.

The dying woman was stretched inert, moveless, upon a rough bed of rope
and rush. Perhaps she had been pretty once, in an animal way. She was not
now. Lips that doubtless had been red were white and drawn in pain; and
there was blood upon them, where white, even teeth had bitten in the way
that those who suffer have of trying to hide a greater suffering beneath
a lesser. The eyes, deep and dark, were dull and half-hidden by their
blue, transparent lids. And the cheeks were sunken, and ghastly--touched
by the hand of death.

A heavy, course-featured woman, thin hair streaked with gray, flat-
backed, flat-breasted, sat beside the rude bed, silent, motionless,
awaiting an end that she had so often watched in the sullen ferocity that
is of beast rather than of man. And on her lap lay a little, pink, puling
thing that whimpered and twisted weakly--a little, naked, thing half
covered by roughly-cast sacking.

The tiny, twisting thing whimpered. The woman beside the bed held it,
waiting. The woman on the bed moaned a little, and the glaze upon the
eyes grew more thick. And that was all.

There came to the ears that were not too new come or too far gone to
hear, the sound of hoof beats upon the turf. They came nearer.... They
stopped. Came the sound of spurred heels striking upon the trodden dirt
without the door.... There stood in the opening the figure of a man. He
was tall, and well-proportioned, though if anything a bit too slender--a