she didn't care so much, after all. What
difference would it have made if the money had been gone?

Father staggered like a drunkard to one of the flimsy, straight,
uncomfortable chairs. But he got himself up and tried to play on the
mouth-organ a careless tune of grassy hills and a summer breeze. While
he played he ridiculed himself for such agony over the loss of an
overcoat, but his philosophizing didn't mean anything. He had lost the
chance of finding work when he had lost the overcoat. He couldn't really
think, and the feeble trickle of music had a tragic absurdity. He
petulantly threw the mouth-organ on the bed, then himself slumped on the
coverlet. His face was grayly hopeless, like ashes or dust or the snow
of great cities.

Mother had been brooding. She was only distantly conscious of his final
collapse. She said, suddenly, bluntly: "Let's go away together. If we
could only die while we are still together and have some nice things to
remember--"

Hers was the less conventional mind of the two. He protested--but it
was a feeble mumble. The world had come to seem unreal; the question of
leaving it rather unimportant.

Much they talked, possibly for hours, but the talk was as confused as
the spatter of furniture in that ill-lighted room--lighted by a gas-jet.
All that they said was but repetition of her first demand.

While he lay on the bed, flat, his arms out, like a prisoner on a rack,
wondering why all his thoughts had become a void in which he could find
no words with which to answer her, she slowly stood up, turned out the
gas, then again opened the gas-cock.

She hastily stripped off her overcoat and fitted it over the crack at
the bottom of the door, where showed a strip of light from the slimy
hall without. She caught up the red cotton table-cloth and stuffed it
along the window, moving clumsily through the room, in which the
darkness was broken only by pallid light that seeped through the window
from cold walls without. She staggered over and lay down beside him. Her
work was done, and in the darkness her worried frown changed to a smile
of divine and mothering kindliness which did not lessen as a thin,
stinging, acid vapor of illuminating gas bit at her throat and made her
cough.

Father raised his head in stupefied alarm. She drew him down, put his
head on her shoulder. She took his hand, to lead him, her little boy,
into a land of summer dreams where they would always be together. The
Innocen