nt downtown to see
Matthews about that pain right here and came home looking shrivelled,
talking shrilly about nothing, and evading Pa's eyes. Followed months
that were just a jumble of agony, X-rays, hope, despair, morphia,
nothingness.

After it was all over: "But I was going first," old man Minick said,
dazedly.

The old house on Ellis near Thirty-ninth was sold for what it would
bring. George, who knew Chicago real-estate if any one did, said they
might as well get what they could. Things would only go lower. You'll
see. And nobody's going to have any money for years. Besides, look at
the neighbourhood!

Old man Minick said George was right. He said everybody was right. You
would hardly have recognized in this shrunken figure and wattled face
the spruce and dressy old man whom Ma Minick used to spoil so
delightfully. "You know best, George. You know best." He who used to
stand up to George until Ma Minick was moved to say, "Now, Pa, you don't
know everything."

After Matthews' bills, and the hospital, and the nurses and the
medicines and the thousand and one things were paid there was left
exactly five hundred dollars a year.

"You're going to make your home with us, Father," George and Nettie
said. Alma, too, said this would be the best. Alma, the married
daughter, lived in Seattle. "Though you know Ferd and I would be only
too glad to have you."

Seattle! The ends of the earth. Oh, no. No! he protested, every fibre
of his old frame clinging to the accustomed. Seattle, at seventy! He
turned piteous eyes on his son George and his daughter-in-law Nettie.
"You're going to make your home with us, Father," they reassured him. He
clung to them gratefully. After it was over Alma went home to her
husband and their children.

So now he lived with George and Nettie in the five-room flat on South
Park Avenue, just across from Washington Park. And there was no extra
pillow on the floor.

Nettie hadn't said he couldn't have the extra pillow. He had told her he
used two and she had given him two the first week. But every morning she
had found a pillow cast on the floor.

"I thought you used two pillows, Father."

"I do."

"But there's always one on the floor when I make the bed in the morning.
You always throw one on the floor. You only sleep on one pillow,
really."

"I use two pillows."

But the second week there was one pillow. He tossed and turned a good
deal there in his bedroom off the kitchen. But he go