She gave him a few instructions. He sat looking
at her as if she were almost a stranger to him, before
whom he was awkward and humble, and also as if he
had lost his presence of mind, and wanted to run.
This feeling that he wanted to run away, that he was
on thorns to be gone from so trying a situation, and
yet must linger because it looked better, made his
presence so trying. He put up his eyebrows for
misery, and clenched his fists on his knees, feeling
so awkward in presence of big trouble.
Mrs. Morel did not change much. She stayed in
Sheffield for two months. If anything, at the
end she was rather worse. But she wanted to go
home. Annie had her children. Mrs. Morel
wanted to go home. So they got a motor-car from
Nottingham—for she was too ill to go by
train—and she was driven through the sunshine.
It was just August; everything was bright and warm.
Under the blue sky they could all see she was dying.
Yet she was jollier than she had been for weeks.
They all laughed and talked.
“Annie,” she exclaimed, “I saw a
lizard dart on that rock!”
Her eyes were so quick; she was still so full of life.
Morel knew she was coming. He had the front door
open. Everybody was on tiptoe. Half the
street turned out. They heard the sound of the
great motor-car. Mrs. Morel, smiling, drove home
down the street.
“And just look at them all come out to see me!”
she said. “But there, I suppose I should
have done the same. How do you do, Mrs. Mathews?
How are you, Mrs. Harrison?”
They none of them could hear, but they saw her smile
and nod. And they all saw death on her face,
they said. It was a great event in the street.
Morel wanted to carry her indoors, but he was too
old. Arthur took her as if she were a child.
They had set her a big, deep chair by the hearth where
her rocking-chair used to stand. When she was
unwrapped and seated, and had drunk a little brandy,
she looked round the room.
“Don’t think I don’t like your house,
Annie,” she said; “but it’s nice
to be in my own home again.”
And Morel answered huskily:
“It is, lass, it is.”
And Minnie, the little quaint maid, said:
“An’ we glad t’ ’ave yer.”
There was a lovely yellow ravel of sunflowers in the
garden. She looked out of the window.
“There are my sunflowers!” she said.
THE RELEASE
“By the way,” said Dr. Ansell one evening
when Morel was in Sheffield, “we’ve got
a man in the fever hospital here who comes from Nottingham—Dawes.
He doesn’t seem to have many belongings in this
world.”
“Baxter Dawes!” Paul exclaimed.
“That’s the man—has been a
fine fellow, physically, I should think. Been
in a bit of a mess lately. You know him?”
“He used to work at the place where I am.”
