is
left? I had thought only of my own envy. Now I sat and watched my mother, and
felt fearful, and ashamed of my own fear.
And when once she rose and went to her room I walked to the window and
stood at the glass. They were still sending up rockets, behind the trees at
Cremorne, even when it rained.
That was to-night. To-morrow night Helen is to come with her friend Miss
Palmer. Miss Palmer is soon to be married.
I am twenty-nine. In three months'' time I shall be thirty. While Mother grows
stooped and querulous, how shall I grow?
I shall grow dry and pale and paper-thin—like a leaf, pressed tight inside the
pages of a dreary black book and then forgotten. I came across just such a leaf
yesterday—it was a piece of ivy—amongst the books upon the shelves behind
Pa''s desk. I went there, telling Mother I meant to begin to look through his
letters; but I went only to think of him. The room is kept just as he left it, with
his pen upon the blotter, his seal, the knife for his cigars, the looking-glass . . .
I remember him standing before that, two weeks after they first found the
cancer in him, and turning his face from it with a ghastly smile. His nurse had told
him, when he was a boy, that invalids should not gaze at their own reflections, for
fear their souls would fly into the glass and kill them.