sing, and
together they would consider, piously, the grave case of the
Humming-bird, and how, between them, they could best "keep him off it."

"It's the dispensary spirits that he gets at," Mr. Ponting said. "That's
the trouble."

(And it always had been.)

"The queer thing is," said Ranny, "that you never fairly see him tight.
Not to speak of."

"That's the worst of it," said Mr. Ponting. "I wish I _could_ see your
father tight--tumbling about a bit, I mean, and being funny. The beastly
stuff's going for him inside, all the time--undermining him. There
isn't an organ," said Mr. Ponting, solemnly, "in your father's body that
it hasn't gone for."

"How d'you know?"

"Why, by the medicines he takes. He's giving himself strophanthus now,
for his heart."

"I say--d'you think my mother knows that?"

"It's impossible to say what your mother knows. More than she lets on, I
shouldn't be surprised."

Mr. Ponting pondered.

"It's wonderful how he keeps it up. His dignity, I mean."

"It's rum, isn't it?" said Ranny. He was apparently absorbed in tying
the strings of his sleeping-suit into loops of absolutely even length.
"But he always _was_ that mysterious kind of bird."

He began to step slowly backward as he buttoned up his jacket. Then, by
way of throwing off the care that oppressed him, and lightening somewhat
Mr. Ponting's burden, he ran forward and took a flying leap over the
Baby's cot into his own bed.

Mr. Ponting looked, if anything, a little graver. "I wouldn't do that,
if I were you," he said.

"Why not?" said Ranny over his blankets, snuggling comfortably.

"Oh, I don't know," said Mr. Ponting, vaguely.

In a day or two Ranny himself knew.

His arrangements had carried him well on into October. In the last week
of that month, on a Tuesday evening, he appeared at the Regent Street
Polytechnic, where he had not been seen since far back in the last year.
It was not at the Gymnasium that he now presented himself, but at the
door of that room where every Tuesday evening, from seven-thirty to
eight-thirty, a qualified practitioner was in attendance.

It was the first time that Ransome had availed himself of this privilege
conferred on him by the Poly.

He said he wouldn't keep the medical man a minute.

But the medical man kept Ranny many minutes, thumping, sounding,
intimately and extensively overhauling him. For more minutes than Ranny
at all liked, he played about him with a stethoscope. Then