ings Christmas-box in his
pocket, Paul wandered blindly home. His mother looked at him, and her
heart stood still.

"What's the matter?" she asked.

"I'm badly, mother!" he replied. "Mr. Jordan gave me five shillings for
a Christmas-box!"

He handed it to her with trembling hands. She put it on the table.

"You aren't glad!" he reproached her; but he trembled violently.

"Where hurts you?" she said, unbuttoning his overcoat.

It was the old question.

"I feel badly, mother."

She undressed him and put him to bed. He had pneumonia dangerously, the
doctor said.

"Might he never have had it if I'd kept him at home, not let him go to
Nottingham?" was one of the first things she asked.

"He might not have been so bad," said the doctor.

Mrs. Morel stood condemned on her own ground.

"I should have watched the living, not the dead," she told herself.

Paul was very ill. His mother lay in bed at nights with him; they could
not afford a nurse. He grew worse, and the crisis approached. One
night he tossed into consciousness in the ghastly, sickly feeling of
dissolution, when all the cells in the body seem in intense irritability
to be breaking down, and consciousness makes a last flare of struggle,
like madness.

"I s'll die, mother!" he cried, heaving for breath on the pillow.

She lifted him up, crying in a small voice:

"Oh, my son--my son!"

That brought him to. He realised her. His whole will rose up and
arrested him. He put his head on her breast, and took ease of her for
love.

"For some things," said his aunt, "it was a good thing Paul was ill that
Christmas. I believe it saved his mother."

Paul was in bed for seven weeks. He got up white and fragile. His father
had bought him a pot of scarlet and gold tulips. They used to flame in
the window in the March sunshine as he sat on the sofa chattering to his
mother. The two knitted together in perfect intimacy. Mrs. Morel's life
now rooted itself in Paul.

William had been a prophet. Mrs. Morel had a little present and a letter
from Lily at Christmas. Mrs. Morel's sister had a letter at the New
Year.

"I was at a ball last night. Some delightful people were there, and I
enjoyed myself thoroughly," said the letter. "I had every dance--did not
sit out one."

Mrs. Morel never heard any more of her.

Morel and his wife were gentle with each other for some time after the
death of their son. He would go into a kind of daze, staring wide-eyed
and bla