ecially fetched."

"Why?" said Edwin. "What's up?"

"Oh, nothing," Maggie answered. "Nothing particular, but you didn't
hear him ringing in the night?"

"Ringing? No! What time?"

"About one o'clock. Jane heard the bell, and she woke me. So I got up
to him. He said he couldn't do with being alone."

"What did you do?"

"I made him something hot and stayed with him."

"What? All night?"

"Yes," said Maggie.

"But why didn't you call me?"

"What was the good?"

"You ought to have called me," he said with curt displeasure, not really
against Maggie, but against himself for having heard naught of all these
happenings. Maggie had no appearance of having passed the night by her
father's bedside.

"Oh," she said lightly, "I dozed a bit now and then. And as soon as the
girl was up I got her to come and sit with him while I spruced myself."

"I'll have a look at him," said Edwin, in another tone.

"Yes, I wish you would." Now, as often, he was struck by Maggie's
singular deference to him, her submission to his judgement. In the past
her attitude had been different; she had exercised the moral rights of
an elder sister; but latterly she had mysteriously transformed herself
into a younger sister.

He went towards his father, drawing his dressing-gown more closely round
him. The chamber had an aspect of freshness and tidiness that made it
almost gay--until he looked at the object in the smoothed and rectified
bed. He nodded to his father, who merely gazed at him. There was no
definite, definable change in the old man's face, but his bearing, even
as he lay, was appreciably more melancholy and impotent. The mere sight
of a man so broken and so sad was humiliating to the humanity which
Edwin shared with him.

"Well, father," he nodded familiarly. "Don't feel like getting up, eh?"
And, remembering that he was the head of the house, the source of
authority and of strength, he tried to be cheerful, casual, and
invigorating, and was disgusted by the futile inefficiency of the
attempt. He had not, like Auntie Hamps, devoted a lifetime to the study
of the trick.

Darius feebly moved his hopeless head to signify a negative.

And Edwin thought, with a lancinating pain, of what the old man had
mumbled on the previous evening: "I shall never go down them stairs
again." Perhaps the old man never would go down those stairs again! He
had paid no serious attention to the remark at the moment, but now it