One candle burned low on the mantelpiece. The fire in the fireplace glowed dull red under gray ash-cover. It could have been revived in an instant with a poke and another log, but both women sat on, concentrated on the dying man. Suddenly his hands thrashed up and free of the bed covering, and each caught and held one. So joined, the three of them tensed with the awful effort of his dying.

She could not have dozed, she told herself, but sometime later she came out of a kind of numb mindedness when she heard Stella say, “He’s gone.” Nell was still holding his right hand, as Stella held his left. His hand was dry and claw-like but warm, or it may have been her own warmth that made his seem so. “He’s gone,” Stella said again. “I know this man, and he’s gone from us.”

Nell did not know what to do with his hand, so after a minute she put it carefully under the bed covering again before she looked at his face. His mouth was open a little; his eyes blessedly were not. It was not he so much as the hair on his head and the stubble on his face that seemed lifeless.

Nell was presently aware that Stella had dropped her head down onto the bed against Felix’s side. The poor woman was exhausted, of course. She had attended him ever since they came to live at Beulah Land shortly after his first stroke of paralysis; she had nursed him lovingly and made his life tolerable.

Familiarity expels horror, and so the two women sat on beside the dead man for another hour before Nell noticed that light—real not hoped-for daylight—showed around the curtains at the windows; and she heard faint sounds from downstairs at the back of the house. Myrtis, or Sharon or Sallou or Lotus, had started a fire in the kitchen stove; soon there would be warmth and a smell of food cooking.

Nell got up from the chair where she had sat for so long and went around the bed to the other side. Fully awake, Stella lifted her head from Felix’s side and said, “I don’t want nobody to touch this man but me. I’ll wash him and dress him. I promised him to do that. When you go downstairs, you tell one of them in the kitchen to bring me up a kettle of hot water.”

Nell acknowledged the words with a nod and went to the door and out. She found Sallou and Lotus in the kitchen and told Lotus to heat a kettle of water and take it up to Stella in her husband’s room. Lotus hastened to do so. Nell turned to Sallou. “I’m hungry,” she said.

“You didn’t eat all yesterday, Miss Nell,” Sallou said.

“Was there any of that squirrel stew left?”

“No’m.”