Chris said I’ve no idea what I’ll do. But I’m dead tired now. Will you watch by your aunt? Niece Izey gave a kind of a shiver: Oh, but I don’t know a thing about nursing. You won’t leave me alone with her, will you?

Chris looked at her in an idle pity, too tired to hate the poor, fusionless thing, a black hoodie-crow scared of a body not yet quite a corpse but ready to pick out its eyes when it died. I’m going up to rest in my own room a while. If there’s any change you can run up and tell me.

Without taking off her clothes she lay on the bed and drew the coverlet over her, not intending to sleep, only rest and lose her aches in the dark. But afore she knew it she was gone, sound, the last whisper she heard the fall of the snow pelting Duncairn in its New Year’s Eve.

She woke from that with a hand on her shoulder, the lanky niece had lighted the gas, she was all a-dither and the long face grey. I’m feared she’s gey ill, and Oh, how you were sleeping. I thought I would never waken you.

Chris got off the bed and tidied her hair. And as she did so she heard from Ma’s room an antrin sound—a blatter of words, then a groan of pain. She was down the stairs and into the room, Izey trailing behind in a lank unease, and saw that it couldn’t be very long now, she had better send for the doctor at once.

Ma Cleghorn was fighting her last fight with the world she had jeered at and sworn at throughout her life, gallant and vulgar, untamed to the end, her arms beating the air in this battle. Chris wiped the spume from the swollen lips, the smell of death already in the air, and did not move as she sat by the bed, the niece went out of the room to be ill, down in Duncairn a late tram tootled; and the dreich fight drew to its close, begun a sixty years before, ending in this—what for, what for?

And suddenly Ma’s lips ceased to twist and slobber with their blowings of brownish spume, her hand in Chris’s slackened with a little jerk; and she stepped from the bed and out of the house and up long stairs that went wandering to Heaven like the stairs on Windmill Brae. And she met at the Gates St Peter himself, in a lum hat and leggings, looking awful stern, the father of all the Wee Free ministers, and he held up his hand and snuffled through his nose and asked in GAWD’S name was she one of the Blessed? And Ma Cleghorn said she was blest if she knew—Lets have a look at this Heaven of yours. And she pushed him aside and took a keek in, and there was God with a plague in one hand and a war and a thunderbolt in the other and the Christ in glory with the angels bowing, and a scraping and banging of harps and drums, ministers thick as a swarm of blue-bottles, no sight of Jim and no sight of Jesus, only the Christ, and she wasn’t impressed. And she said to St Peter This is no place for me, and turned and went striding into the mists and across the fire-tipped clouds to her home.