come off on the sheets!" And then they
hurried home to sleep sound.

But there was little sleep for the doctor that night, perhaps because
he had got so young all of a sudden. So it didn't matter much that his
mother countermanded his proposal that bed should be gone to, on the
ground that it was so late now that she wouldn't be able to sleep
a wink. If she _could_ have gone an hour ago it would have been
different. Now it was too late. An aggressive submissiveness was
utilized by the good lady to the end of his discomfort and that of
Mrs. Iggulden, who--perhaps from some memories of the Norman Conquest
hanging about the neighbourhood--would never go to bed as long as a
light was burning in the house.

"It is very strange and most unusual, I know," she continued saying
after she had scarified a place to scratch on. "Your great-uncle
Everett Gayler did not scruple to call it phenomenal, and that when
I was the merest child. After eleven no sleep!" She continued her
knitting with tenacity to illustrate her wakefulness. "But I am glad,
dear Conrad, that you forgot about me. You were in pleasanter society
than your old mother's. No one shall have any excuse for saying I am
a burden on my son. No, my dear boy, my wish is that you shall feel
_free_." She laid aside the knitting needles, and folding her hands
across the outline Sally was to be dragged up, or along, dropped her
eyelids over a meek glare, and sat with a fixed, submissive undersmile
slightly turned towards her son.

"But I thought, mother, as Mrs. Fenwick was here...." Slow, slight,
acquiescent nods stopped him; they were enough to derail any speech
except the multiplication-table or the House-that-Jack-built! But
she waited with exemplary patience for certainty that the train had
stopped. Then spoke as one that gives a commission to speech,
and observes its execution at a distance. Her expression remained
immutable. "She is a well-meaning person," said she.

"I didn't know how late it was." Poor Dr. Conrad gives up
self-defence--climbs down. "The time ran away." It _had_ done so,
there was no doubt about that.

"And you forgot your mother. But Mrs. Fenwick is a well-meaning
person. We will say no more about it."

Whereupon her son, feeling that silence is golden, said nothing. But
he went and kissed her for all that. She said inscrutably: "You might
have kissed me." But whether she was or wasn't referring to the fact
that she had succeeded in negotiating