at! So I've got a room in a
hospital! See? Be better all round!" He swayed forward.

"Johnny!" Roger caught him just in time, and the boy lay senseless in his
arms.

* * * * *

At home, a few hours later, Allan came with another physician down from
John's small bedroom. He saw his colleague to the door and then came in to
Roger.

"I'm afraid Johnny has come to the end."

For a moment Roger stared at him.

"Has, eh," he answered huskily. "You're absolutely sure he has? There's
nothing--nothing on earth we can do?"

"Nothing more than we're doing now."

"He has fooled you fellows before, you know--"

"Not this time."

"How long will it be?"

"Days or hours--I don't know."

"He mustn't suffer!"

"I'll see to that." Roger rose and walked the floor.

"It was the last month did it, of course--"

"Yes--"

"I blame myself for that."

"I wouldn't," said Allan gently. "You've done a good deal for Johnny Geer."

"He has done a good deal for this family! Can Deborah see him?"

"I wish she could."

"Better stretch a point for her, hadn't you? She's been a kind of a mother
to John."

"I know. But she can't leave her bed."

"Then you won't tell her?"

"I think she knows. She talked to me about him last night."

"That's it, a mother!" Roger cried. "She was watching! We were blind!" He
came back to his chair and dropped into it.

"Does John know this himself?" he asked.

"He suspects it, I think," said Allan.

"Then go and tell him, will you, that he's going to get well. And after
you've done it I'll see him myself. I've got something in mind I want to
think out."

After Allan had left the room, Roger sat thinking about John. He thought of
John's birth and his drunken mother, the accident and his struggle for
life, through babyhood and childhood, through ignorance and filth and pain,
through din and clamor and hunger, fear; of the long fierce fight which
John had made not to be "put away" in some big institution, of his battle
to keep up his head, to be somebody, make a career for himself. He thought
of John's becoming one of Deborah's big family, only one of thousands, but
it seemed now to Roger that John had stood out from them all, as the figure
best embodying that great fierce hunger for a full life, and as the link
connecting, the one who slowly year by year had emerged from her greater
family and come into her small one. And last of all he thought of John as
his