he had not cared enough about his
father. And he said to himself, "He must have cared a lot more than he
ever let on."

The way to the Divorce Court had been made marvelously smooth for him.
His mother couldn't say now that it would kill his father.

But on Monday morning things did not go with Ransome entirely as he had
expected. Shaftesbury Avenue refused to lend him more than ten pounds on
the security of his furniture. Still, that was a trifling hitch. Now
that the proceedings had been consecrated by his father's sanction,
there could be no doubt that his mother would be glad to lend him the
five pounds. He would ask her for it that evening as soon as he got
home.

* * * * *

But he did not ask her that evening, nor yet the next. He did not ask
her for it at all. For as soon as he got home she came to him out of his
father's room. She stood at the head of the stairs by the door of the
room, leaning against the banisters. And she was crying.

"Is Father worse?" he said.

"He's going, my dear. There's a trained nurse just come. She's in there
with the doctor. But they can't do anything."

He drew her into the front room, and she told him what had happened.

"He was sittin' in his chair there like he was yesterday--so bright--and
I thought he was better, and I made him a drop of chicken broth and sat
with him while he took it. Then I left him there for a bit and went
upstairs to the children--Dossie was sick this morning--"

"Dossie--?"

"It's nothing--she's upset with something she's eaten--and I was there
with her ten minutes per'aps, and when I came back I found your Father
in a fit. A convulsion, the doctor says it was; he said all along he
might have them, but I thought he was better. And he's had another this
evening, and he hasn't come round out of it right. He doesn't know me,
Ranny."

He had nothing to say to her. It was as if he had known that it would
happen, and that it would happen like this, that he would come home at
this hour and find his mother standing at the head of the stairs, and
that she would tell him these things in these words. He even had the
feeling that he ought to have told _her_, to have warned her that it
would be so.

On Wednesday evening, at eight o'clock, when Ransome should have been in
the lawyer's room at the Polytechnic, he was standing by his father's
bed. Mr. Ransome had partially recovered consciousness, and he lay
supported by his