rd to him; who, if it came to
that, had never done anything for him beyond contributing,
infinitesimally, to his existence. And even this Mr. Ransome had done by
accident and inadvertence, thinking (if he could be said to have been
thinking at all) of his own pleasure and not of his son's interests; for
Ranny, if he had been consulted, would probably have preferred to owe
his existence to some other parent.

And even in his last act, his dying, in his choice of that hour, of all
hours open to him to die in, Mr. Ransome had inflicted an incurable
injury upon his son. He had timed it to a minute. And Ranny knew it. He
had had the idea firmly fixed in his head that if he did not go to the
Polytechnic and find out how to set about filing his petition that
Wednesday night, he would never get his divorce. Things would happen,
they were bound to happen if he gave them time.

And yet that death, so ill-timed, so disastrous for Ranny in its
consequences, Ranny mourned as if it had been in itself an affliction,
an irreparable loss. He felt with the most entire sincerity that now
that the Humming-bird was dead he would never be happy again.

On the Sunday after the funeral, which was on the Saturday, he sat in
the front parlor with his mother and Mr. and Mrs. Randall, listening
with a dumb but poignant acquiescence to all that they were saying about
his father. Their idea now was that Mr. Ransome was not only a good man,
a man of indissoluble integrity, but a man of unimaginably profound
emotions, of passionate affections concealed under the appearance of
austerity.

"No one knows," Mrs. Ransome was saying, "what 'E was thinking and what
'E was feeling--what went on inside him no one ever knew. For all he
said about it you'd have thought he didn't take much notice of what
happened--Ranny's trouble--and yet I know he felt it something awful. It
preyed on 'is mind, poor Ranny being left like that. Why, it was after
that, if you remember, that he began to break up. I put all his illness
down to that.

"And then the children--you might say he didn't take much notice of
them, but 'E was thinking about them all the time, you may depend upon
it. 'E sent for them the Sunday before he died. I'm glad he did, too.
Aren't you, Ranny?"

"Yes, Mother," Ranny said, and choked.

"It'll be something for them to remember him by when they grow up. But
they'll never know what was in his heart. None of us ever knew nor ever
will know, now."