t the quotation,
which he was burning to correct, but sighed to find that it had set
the dominies on his left talking about precocity. "To produce such a
graybeard of a book at two and twenty, Mr. Sandys," said Cathro, "is
amazing. It partakes, sir, of the nature of the miraculous; it's
onchancey, by which we mean a deviation from the normal." And so on.
To escape this kind of flattery (he had so often heard it said by
ladies, who could say it so much better), Tommy turned to his
neighbours on the right.

Oddly enough, they also were discussing deviations from the normal. On
the table was a plant in full flower, and Ailie, who had lent it, was
expressing surprise that it should bloom so late in the season.

"So early in its life, I should rather say," the doctor remarked after
examining it. "It is a young plant, and in the ordinary course would
not have come to flower before next year. But it is afraid that it
will never see next year. It is one of those poor little plants that
bloom prematurely because they are diseased."

Tommy was a little startled. He had often marvelled over his own
precocity, but never guessed that this might be the explanation why he
was in flower at twenty-two. "Is that a scientific fact?" he asked.

"It is a law of nature," the doctor replied gravely, and if anything
more was said on the subject our Tommy did not hear it. What did he
hear? He was a child again, in miserable lodgings, and it was sometime
in the long middle of the night, and what he heard from his bed was
his mother coughing away her life in hers. There was an angry knock,
knock, knock, from somewhere near, and he crept out of bed to tell his
mother that the people through the wall were complaining because she
would not die more quietly; but when he reached her bed it was not his
mother he saw lying there, but himself, aged twenty-four or
thereabouts. For Tommy had inherited his mother's cough; he had known
it every winter, but he remembered it as if for the first time now.

Did he hear anything else? I think he heard his wings slipping to the
floor.

He asked Ailie to give him the plant, and he kept it in his room very
lovingly, though he forgot to water it. He sat for long periods
looking at it, and his thoughts were very deep, but all he actually
said aloud was, "There are two of us." Aaron sometimes saw them
together, and thought they were an odd pair, and perhaps they were.

Tommy did not tell Grizel of the tragedy t