If the Dead Knew by May Sinclair

The doctor had gone. Hollyer went back into his mother's room. She lay / there, dozing, in the big white bed, propped high on the pillows. / Through her mouth, piteously open, he could hear her short quick breath, / struggling and gasping.

The illness had lasted nine days. Even now Hollyer hadn't got used to / it. He still looked at the figure in the bed with the same stare of / shocked incredulity. It was still incredible that his mother's influenza / should have turned to pleurisy, that she should lie like that, utterly / abandoned, the neat pile of her hair undone, and her face, with its open / mouth, loose and infirm between the two white loops that hung askew, / rumpled by the pillow. He knew in a vague way how it had happened. First / his own attack of influenza, then his mother's. His had been pretty bad, / but hers had been slight, so slight that it had not been recognized, and / through it she had still nursed him. Then she had gone out too soon, in / the raw January weather. And now the doctor came morning and evening; / she had a trained nurse for the night, and Hollyer looked after her all / day.