The little room was half filled by the big white bed. It seemed to him there was nothing in it but the white bed and his mother and Nurse Eden in her white uniform. She had looked in on her way downstairs to tea. Everything was cold and white. On the window-panes the frost made a white pattern of moss and feathers. From his seat between the bed and the fire he could see Nurse Eden and her small, pure face brooding above the pillows as she shifted them with tender, competent hands.
“She’ll be better in the morning,” she said. “She always gets better in the night.”
She did. Always she gained ground in the night under Nurse Eden and always she lost it in the daytime, getting worse and worse towards evening.
The afternoon wore on. At four o’clock old Martha, the servant, tapped at the door. Miss Carroll, she said, was downstairs and wanted to see him. Martha took his place at the bedside.
Every day Effie came to inquire, and every day she went away sad, as if it had been her own mother who was dying. This time she stayed, for the old doctor had stopped her in the Square and told her to get Hollyer out of his mother’s room, if possible. “Talk to him. Take him off it. Make him buck up.”
She sat in his mother’s chair behind the round tea-table and poured out his tea for him, and talked to him about his music and a book she had been reading. When he looked at her, at her sweet face, soft and clear with youth, at her hands moving with pretty gestures, his heart trembled. That was how it would be if Effie was his wife. They would sit there every day and she would pour out his tea for him. He would hear her feet ruftning up and down the stairs.
When she got up to go she said, “Whatever you do, Wilfrid, don’t keep on thinking about it.”
She put her hand on his sleeve and stroked it. At her touch he broke down.
“Oh, Effie—I cannot bear it. If she dies, I shall never forgive myself.”
“Nonsense. Don’t talk about her dying. Don’t think about it.”
She turned to him on the doorstep. “Just think how strong she is. I can’t see her ill, somehow. I see her there, all the time, sitting upright in her chair, looking beautiful.”
That was how _he_ had once seen her, sitting there between the fire and the round tea-table, for years and years, as long as his own life lasted.