s further proclaimed by the immense bottles, three in a row
(the Carboys, Mr. Ransome called them), holding the magic liquids, a
blue, a red, and a yellow, wide-bellied at the base, and with pyramids
for stoppers. Under them, dividing the window pane, a narrow gold band
with black lettering advertised three distinct mineral waters.

A yellow-ochre blind now screened the lower half of that window. Drawn
down unevenly and tilted at the bottom corner, it suffered a vague
glimpse of objects that from his earliest years had never ceased to
offend Ranny's sense of the beautiful and fit.

He had not as yet considered very deeply the problems of his life.
Otherwise, in returning every night to his father's house, it must have
struck him that he was not what you might call a free man. For his
father's house had no door except the shop door, and it was the
peculiarity of that shop door that it did not admit of any latch key.
Every night young Ransome had to ring, and it was usually Mercier, with
his abominable smile, who let him in.

To-night the door was opened cautiously on the chain and somebody
whispered, "Is that you, Ranny?"

The chain was slipped, and he entered.

A small bead of gas burned on a bracket somewhere behind the counter.
The light slid, pale as water, over the glass and mahogany of the
show-cases, wherein white objects appeared as confused and disconnected
patches. The darkness effaced every object in the shop that was not
white, with the queer effect that rows upon rows of white jars showed as
if hanging on it unsupported by their shelves. Very close, turned up to
him out of the darkness, was Ranny's mother's face. He kissed it.

"Where's that Mercier?" said Ranny's mother.

"What? Isn't he back yet?"

"No," said Ranny's mother. "And your father's got the Headache."

By a tender and most pardonable confusion between the symptoms and its
cause Ranny's mother had hit upon a phrase that made it possible for
them to discuss his father's affliction without the smallest, most
shadowy reference to its essential nature. For Ranny's mother, such
reference would have been the last profanity, a sacrilege committed
against the divinities of the hearth and of the marriage bed. But for
that phrase Mr. Ransome's weakness must have been passed in silence as
the unspeakable, incredible, unthinkable thing it was.

At the phrase, more frequent in his mother's mouth than ever, Ranny drew
in his lips for a whistle; but