wants to show his gratitude," said Auntie Hamps.

"Ye-hes," Darius repeated, and wiped his eyes.

Edwin stood foolishly holding the watch with its massive Albert chain.
He was very genuinely astonished, and he was profoundly moved. His
father's emotion concerning him must have been gathering force for
months and months, increasing a little and a little every day in those
daily, intimate contacts, until at length gratitude had become, as it
were, a spirit that possessed him, a monstrous demon whose wild
eagerness to escape defeated itself. And Edwin had never guessed, for
Darius had mastered the spirit till the moment when the spirit mastered
him. It was out now, and Darius, delivered, breathed more freely.
Edwin was proud, but his humiliation was greater than his pride. He
suffered humiliation for his father. He would have preferred that
Darius should never have felt gratitude, or, at any rate, that he should
never have shown it. He would have preferred that Darius should have
accepted his help nonchalantly, grimly, thanklessly, as a right. And if
through disease, the old man could not cease to be a tyrant with
dignity, could not become human without this appalling ceremonial
abasement--better that he should have exercised harshness and oppression
to the very end! There was probably no phenomenon of human nature that
offended Edwin's instincts more than an open conversion.

Maggie turned nervously away and busied herself with the grate.

"You must put it on," said Auntie Hamps sweetly. "Mustn't he, father?"

Darius nodded.

The outrage was complete. Edwin removed his own watch and dropped it
into the pocket of his trousers, substituting for it the gold one.

"There, father!" exclaimed Auntie Hamps proudly, surveying the curve of
the Albert on her nephew's waistcoat.

"Ay!" Darius murmured, and sank back on the pillow with a sigh of
relief.

"Thanks, father," Edwin muttered, reddening. "But there was no
occasion."

"Now you see what it is to be a good son!" Auntie Hamps observed.

Darius murmured indistinctly.

"What is it?" she asked, bending down.

"I must have his," said Darius. "I must have a watch here."

"He wants your old one in exchange," Clara explained eagerly.

Edwin smiled, discovering a certain alleviation in this shrewd demand of
his father's, and he drew out the silver Geneva.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

THREE.

Shortly aft