instead of whistling he said, "Poor old
Humming-bird."

"It's one of His bad ones," said Ranny's mother.

He raised the flap of the counter, and they went through. He turned up
the gas so that the outlines of things asserted themselves and the
labels on the white jars gave out their secret gold. On one of these
labels, Hydrarg. Amm., which had no meaning for him, Ranny fixed a
fascinated gaze, thus avoiding the revelations of his mother's face.

For Ranny's mother's face showed that she had been crying.

Plump, and yet not large, her figure and her face were formed for gaiety
and charm. Her little nose was uptilted like Ranny's; but something that
was not gaiety, but pathos, had dragged down and made tremulous the
corners of a mouth that had once been tilted too--a flowerlike mouth, of
the same tender texture as her face, a face that was once one wide-open,
innocent pink flower. Now it was washed out and burnt with the courses
of her tears. Worry had fretted her soft forehead into lines and twisted
her eyebrows in an expression as of permanent surprise at life's
handiwork. And under them her dim-blue eyes, red-lidded, looked out with
the same sorrow and dismay. There was nothing left of her beauty but
her exuberant light-brown hair, which she dressed high on her head with
a twist and a topknot piteously reminiscent of gaiety and charm.

She laid her hand on the knob of the left-hand inner door.

"He's in the dispensin'-room," she said.

Ranny turned round. His features tilted slightly, compelled by something
preposterous in the vision she had evoked.

"Whatever game is he playin' there?"

A faint flicker passed over his mother's face, as if it pleased her that
he could talk in that way.

"Prescription," she said, and paused between her words to let it sink
into him. "Makin' it up, he is. Old Mr. Beesley's heart mixture."

"My Hat!" said Ranny. He was impressed by the gravity of the situation.

There were all sorts of things, such as toothbrushes, patent medicines,
babies' comforters, that Ranny's father with a Headache, or Ranny
himself or his mother could be trusted to dispense at a moment's notice.
But the drug strophanthus, prescribed for old Mr. Beesley, was not one
of them. It was tricky stuff. He knew all about it; Mercier had told
him. Whether it was to do Mr. Beesley good or not would depend on the
precise degree and kind of Ranny's father's Headache.

"I've never known your father's Headache so ba