In the dark hours which followed, that awful fact overshadowed even her father's slow and difficult dying.

To his wife he no longer counted: he had become extinct when he ceased to fulfil his purpose, and she sat at his side with the provisional air of a traveller who waits for a belated train to start.

Lily's feelings were softer: she pitied him in a frightened ineffectual way.

But the fact that he was for the most part unconscious, and that his attention, when she stole into the room, drifted away from her after a moment, made him even more of a stranger than in the nursery days when he had never come home till after dark.

She seemed always to have seen him through a blur--first of sleepiness, then of distance and indifference--and now the fog had thickened till he was almost indistinguishable.