Yes, as distinctly as though she were standing by his side, he heard his cousin Mary's voice.
"Are you there ?" he said, quite hopelessly, merely as a matter of form--of very common form--and well-nigh fell to the ground when he received the reply: "Yes, yes, but I have just been telegraphed for to go to Beaulieu; my mother is very ill." "What is the matter with her ?" he asked; and she replied: "Inflammation of the lungs--but I must stop; I can't speak any more." Then came some sobs and silence.
That same afternoon, by Mary's direction, the aerophone was brought back to him in a dog-cart, and three days later he heard that her mother, Mrs.Porson, was dead.
Some months passed, and when they met again, on her return from the Riviera, Morris found his cousin changed.

She had parted from him a child, and now, beneath the shadow of the wings of grief, suddenly she had become a woman.

Moreover, the best and frankest part of their intimacy seemed to have vanished.

There was a veil between them.

Mary thought of little, and at this time seemed to care for no one except her mother, who was dead.