filling the room, and orchestrating every moment in it—gave to the scene its final note of horror.
Ben lay upon the bed below them, drenched in light, like some enormous insect on a naturalist’s table, fighting, while they looked at him, to save with his poor wasted body the life that no one could save for him. It was monstrous, brutal.
As Eugene approached, Ben’s fear-bright eyes rested upon the younger brother for the first time and bodilessly, without support, he lifted his tortured lungs from the pillow, seizing the boy’s wrists fiercely in the hot white circle of his hands, and gasping in strong terror like a child: “Why have you come? Why have you come home,’Gene?”
The boy stood white and dumb for a moment, while swarming pity and horror rose in him.
“They gave us a vacation, Ben,” he said presently. “They had to close down on account of the flu.”
Then he turned away suddenly into the black murk, sick with his poor lie, and unable to face the fear in Ben’s gray eyes.
“All right,’Gene,” said Bessie Gant, with an air of authority. “Get out of here—you and Helen both. I’ve got one crazy Gant to look after already. I don’t want two more in here.” She spoke harshly, with an unpleasant laugh.
She was a thin woman of thirty-eight years, the wife of Gant’s nephew, Gilbert. She was of mountain stock: she was coarse, hard, and vulgar, with little pity in her, and a cold lust for the miseries of sickness and death. These inhumanities she cloaked with her professionalism, saying:
“If I gave way to my feelings, where would the patient be?”
When they got out into the hall again, Eugene said angrily to Helen: “Why have you got that death’s-head here? How can he get well with her around? I don’t like her!”
“Say what you like—she’s a good nurse.” Then, in a low voice, she said: “What do you think?”
He turned away, with a convulsive gesture. She burst into tears, and seized his hand.
Luke was teetering about restlessly, breathing stertorously and smoking
