"No," was her answer.

"He was lying asleep in my arms last night, and William" (her husband) "came to me and said that he wanted Alf with him, but that I might keep the other two." In vain she was assured that she had been dreaming, that it was quite natural that she should dream about her husband, and that her anxiety for the child had given the dream its shape.

Nothing would persuade her that she had not seen her husband, or that the information he had given her was not true.

So it was no matter of surprise to her when in the following March her arms were empty, and a waxen form lay lifeless in the baby's cot.
My brother and I were allowed to see him just before he was placed in his coffin; I can see him still, so white and beautiful, with a black spot in the middle of the fair, waxen forehead, and I remember the deadly cold which startled me when I was told to kiss my little brother.

It was the first time that I had touched Death.