It had all been horribly vivid, and when Jane had murmured Charley's name in a dying voice, they had stood, trembling and blue with cold, around her bed, waiting for the end.

But the end had not come, and three months later Jane was married to Charley Gracey.
After that scene, Gabriella had associated Jane's attacks with a freezing January night and a fireless grate (though the last but one had occurred in mid-August), and she was relieved now to find a fire burning in her mother's room and a kettle singing merrily on the fender.

The elder children, with their flannel petticoats pinned over their thin little shoulders, were sitting straight and stiff on a box couch which had been turned into a bed, and their strange little faces looked wan and peaked in the firelight.
Jane was really ill, Gabriella decided, after a glance at her sister.
Nothing except acute suffering could have given her that ghastly pallor or made her eyes sink so far back in her head.

She lay quite motionless on the far side of the big tester bed, staring straight up at the ceiling with an expression which terrified Gabriella, though she had seen it on her sister's face at least a dozen times before to-night.
"Has Arthur gone ?" asked Mrs.Carr in a voice that sounded as if she were running.
"Yes.

Did you want him, mother ?" "I thought we might send him for the doctor and for Charley.