son's arms in preference to his own bed. For his bed
had become odious to him, sinking under him, falling from him
treacherously as he sank and fell, whereas Ranny's muscles adjusted
themselves to all his sinkings and fallings. They remained and could be
felt in the disintegration that presently separated them from the rest
of Ranny, Ranny's arms being there, close under him, and Ranny's face a
long way off at the other end of the room.

The process of dissolution had nothing to do with Mr. Ransome. It went
on, not in him but outside him, in the room. He was almost unaware of
it, it was so inconceivably gradual, so immeasurably slow. First of all
the room began to fill with gray fog, and for ages and ages Ranny's face
and his wife's face hung over him, bodiless, like pale lumps in the fog.
Then for ages and for ages they were blurred, and then withdrawn from
him, then blotted out.

This dying, which was so eternally tedious to Mr. Ransome, lasted about
twenty minutes, so that at half past eight, when Ranny should have been
listening to his legal adviser, he was trying to understand what the
doctor was trying to tell him about the causes, the very complicated
causes of his father's death.

* * * * *

And with Mr. Ransome's death there came again on Ranny and his mother,
and on all of them, the innocence and the immense delusion in which they
had lived, in which they had kept it up, in the days before Ranny's wife
had run away from him and before Ranny's enlightenment and his awful
outburst. Only the innocence was ten times more persistent, the delusion
ten times more solemn and more unutterably sacred now. Mr. Ransome's
death made it impossible for them to speak or think or feel about him
otherwise than if he had been a good man. If Ranny could have doubted it
he would have stood reproved. From the doctor's manner, from his Uncle
Randall's manner and his Aunt Randall's, from Mr. Ponting's and the
assistant's manner, and from the manner, the swollen grief, uncontrolled
and uncontrollable, of the servant Mabel, he would have gathered that
his father was a good man.

But Ransome never doubted it. He spoke, he thought, he felt as if his
father's death had left him inconsolable. It was the death of a man who
had made them all ashamed and miserable; who had tried to take the joy
out of Ranny's life as he had already taken it out of Ranny's mother's
face; who had hardly ever spoken a kind wo