est spirit wholesale, and with a professional impunity. So
inviolate was his privacy that not even the wine and spirit merchant
next door could gage the amount of his expenditure in this item.

Thus, in Mrs. Ransome's eyes, the worst Headache he had ever had could
not impair his innermost integrity. Her vision of him was inspired by an
innocence and sincerity that were of the substance of her soul. And in
this optimism she had brought up her son.

Ranny, with his venturesomeness, had carried it a step further. For
Ranny, not only did Mr. Ransome's inebriety conceal itself under the
name of Headache, but in those hours when the Headache cast its
intolerable gloom over the household Ranny persisted--from his childhood
he had persisted--in regarding his father, perversely, as the source and
fount of joy.

It was in this happy light he saw him on Sunday morning, when Mrs.
Ransome came into the back parlor, where he was hiding his paper, _The
Pink 'Un_, behind him under the sofa cushions. She was wearing her new
slaty-gray gown with the lace collar, and a head-dress that combined the
decorum of the bonnet with the levity and fascination of the hat. Black
it was, with a spray of damask roses and their leaves, that spring
upward from Mrs. Ransome's left ear.

"Your father's goin' to church," she said.

Ranny sat up among his cushions and said: "Oh, Lord! That Humming-bird's
a fair treat."

He took it as a supreme instance of his father's humor.

But that was not the way Mrs. Ransome meant that he should take it.
Ranny's admiration implied that the Humming-bird was carrying it off,
successfully, if you like, but still carrying it. Whereas what she
desired him to see was that there was nothing to be carried off.
Obviously there could not be, when Mr. Ransome was prepared to go to
church.

For the going to church of Mr. Ransome was itself a ritual, a high
religious ceremony. Hitherto he had kept himself pure for it, abstaining
from all Headache overnight. It was this habitual consecration of Mr.
Ransome that made his last lapse so remarkable and so important, while
it revealed it as fortuitous. Ranny had missed the deep logic of his
mother's statement. Mr. Ransome was sidesman at the Parish Church, and
at no time was the Headache compatible with being sidesman.

Nothing had ever interfered with the slow pageant of Mr. Ransome's
progress toward church. Outside in the passage he was lingering over his
preparations: the a