know presently when you can
look at it as it reelly is. Nobody could have done more for your father
than you did. If he'd been the best father in the world you couldn't
have done more."

"Doin' things is nothing. Besides, I didn't. D'you know, I wouldn't go
into his business when he wanted me to? I wouldn't do it, just because I
couldn't bear bein' with him all the time. And he knew it."

"I don't care if he did know it, Ranny. You'd a perfect right to live
your own life. You'd a right to choose what you'd do and where you'd be.
As it was, you never had any life of your own where your father was
about. I can remember how it was, dear, if you don't. If you'd given in
because he wanted you to; if you'd been boxed up with him down there
from morning till night, you'd never have had any life at all. Not as
much as _that_! And then, instead of caring for him as you did, you'd
have got to hate him, and then he'd have hated you; and your mother
would have been torn between you. That's how it would have been, and you
knew it. Else you'd never have left him."

"I say--fancy your knowin' all that!"

"Of course I know it. I knew it all the time."

"Who told you?"

"You don't have to be told things like that, Ranny."

The hand she was stroking moved from under her hand and caught it and
grasped it tight.

"Didn't I always know you were a dear?" she went on. "You said I didn't
know anything about you. But I knew that much."

"Yes--but--how did you know I cared for him?"

"Oh, why--because--you couldn't have called him the Humming-bird and
all those funny names you did if you hadn't cared. And, of course, he
knew that too. That's what he wouldn't let on, dear--the lot he knew. It
must have made him feel so nice and comfortable inside him to know that
whatever he was to do you'd go on calling him a Humming-bird."

"D'you think it did--reelly?"

"Why--don't you remember how it used to make your mother smile? Well,
then."

Well, then, she seemed to say, it was all right.

That was how she brought him round, to sanity when he thought his brain
was going and to happiness when he felt it so improbable, not to say
impossible, that he should ever be happy again.

* * * * *

A fortnight passed.

In the three days following the death he had not thought once about his
own concerns. He simply hadn't time to think of them. Every minute he
could spare was taken up with the arrangements for his f