up, a faint relieved smile
crossing her anxious face. Then, as Alf returned her glance, his eyes
became fixed, and he looked beyond her and up over her head. Jenny stood
in the doorway, fully dressed, but without either hat or coat, her face
blanched at the picture before her.

ii

To Jenny, coming with every precautionary quietness into the house, the
sight came as the greatest shock. She found the kitchen door ajar, heard
voices, and then burst upon the three feebly illumined figures. Emmy,
still in her out-of-doors coat, knelt beside Alf upon the floor; and
between them, with a face terribly grey, lay Pa, still in his old red
nightshirt, with one of his bare feet showing. The stained shirt, upon
which the marks of water, looking in this light perfectly black, might
have been those of blood, filled Jenny with horror. It was only when she
saw both Emmy and Alf staring mutely at her that she struggled against
the deadly faintness that was thickening a veil of darkness before her
eyes. It was a dreadful moment.

"Hullo Jen!" Alf said. "Look here!"

"I thought you must be in bed," Emmy murmured. "Isn't it awful!"

Not a suspicion! Her heart felt as if somebody had sharply pinched it.
They did not know she had been out! It made her tremble in a sudden
flurry of excited relief. She quickly came forward, bending over Pa.
Into his cheeks there had come the faintest wash of colour. His eyelids
fluttered. Jenny stooped and took his hand, quite mechanically, pressing
it between hers and against her heart. And at that moment Pa's eyes
opened wide, and he stared up at her. With Alf at his side and Emmy
behind him, supporting his head upon her lap, Pa could see only Jenny,
and a twitching grin fled across his face--a grin of loving recognition.
It was succeeded by another sign of recovery, a peculiar fumbling
suggestion of remembered cunning.

"Jenny, my dearie," whispered Pa, gaspingly. "A good ... boy!" His eyes
closed again.

Emmy looked in quick challenge at Alf, as if to say "You see how it is!
She comes in last, and it's her luck that he should see her.... _Always_
the same!" And Jenny was saying, very low:

"It looks to me as if you'd been a bad boy!"

"Can't be with him _all_ the time!" Emmy put in, having reached a point
of general self-defence in the course of her mental explorations. She
was recovering from her shock and her first horrible fears.

"Shall we get him to bed? Carry him back in there?" Jenny a