If the Dead Knew by May Sinclair — Read

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.