, that's it,' said his mother. 'Now look round and see what's
happening. Curiosity! Well, if you WILL bob your head, I can't help it.'

'Of course you can!' the nurse didn't say.

Then he put his finger into his mouth side by side with the bottle, and
gagged himself, and choked, and gave a terrible--excuse the
word--hiccough. After which he seemed to lose interest in the milk, and
the pumping operations slackened and then ceased.

'Goosey!' whispered his mother, 'getting seepy? Is the sandman throwing
sand in your eyes? Old Sandman at it? Sh--' ... He had gone.

Emmie took him. The women spoke in whispers. And Mrs Blackshaw, after a
day spent in being a mother, reconstituted herself a wife, and began to
beautify herself for her husband.

II

Yes, there was a Mr Blackshaw, and with Mr Blackshaw the tragedy of the
bath commences. Mr Blackshaw was a very important young man. Indeed, it
is within the mark to say that, next to his son, he was the most
important young man in Bursley. For Mr Blackshaw was the manager of the
newly opened Municipal Electricity Works. And the Municipal Electricity
had created more excitement and interest than anything since the 1887
Jubilee, when an ox was roasted whole in the market-place and turned
bad in the process. Had Bursley been a Swiss village, or a French
country town, or a hamlet in Arizona, it would have had its electricity
fifteen years ago, but being only a progressive English Borough, with
an annual value of a hundred and fifty thousand pounds, it struggled on
with gas till well into the twentieth century. Its great neighbour
Hanbridge had become acquainted with electricity in the nineteenth
century.

All the principal streets and squares, and every decent shop that
Hanbridge competition had left standing, and many private houses, now
lighted themselves by electricity, and the result was splendid and
glaring and coldly yellow. Mr. Blackshaw developed into the hero of the
hour. People looked at him in the street as though he had been the
discoverer and original maker of electricity. And if the manager of the
gasworks had not already committed murder, it was because the manager
of the gasworks had a right sense of what was due to his position as
vicar's churchwarden at St Peter's Church.

But greatness has its penalties. And the chief penalty of Mr
Blackshaw's greatness was that he could not see Roger have his nightly
bath. It was impossible for Mr Blackshaw to quit