ne he'll sell."

"What's more," said the chemist, with a sinister intonation, "I can tell
who'll want 'em."

"Can you reelly now?" said Mrs. Randall. "Why, Fulleymore, you should
have been a doctor. Shouldn't he, Emmy?"

Mrs. Ransome laughed softly in her pride. "He couldn't be much more than
He is. Why, He doctors half the poor people in Wandsworth. They all come
to Him, whether it's toothache or bronchitis or the influenza, or a
housemaid with a whitlow on her finger, and He prescribes for all. If
all the doctors in Wandsworth died to-morrow some of us would be no
worse off."

"Many's the doctor's bill he's saved me," said Mr. Randall.

"Yes, but it's a tryin' life for Him, sufferin' as He is in 'is own
'ealth. Never knowin' when the night bell won't ring, and He have to get
up out of his warm bed. He doesn't spare Himself, I can tell you."

And on they went for another quarter of an hour, boldly asserting,
delicately hinting, subtly suggesting that Mr. Ransome was a good man;
as if, Ranny reflected, anybody had ever said he wasn't. Mr. Ransome
withdrew himself to his armchair by the fireplace, and the hymn of
praise went on; it flowed round him where he sat morose and remote; and
Ranny, in the window seat, was silent, listening with an inscrutable
intentness to the three voices that ran on. He marveled at the way they
kept it up. When his mother's light soprano broke, breathless for a
moment, on a top note, Mrs. Randall's rich, guttural contralto came to
its support, Mr. Randall supplying a running accompaniment of bass. And
now they burst, all three of them, into anecdote and reminiscence,
illustrating what they were all agreed about, that Mr. Ransome was a
good man.

Nobody asked Ranny to join in; nobody knew, nobody cared what he was
thinking, least of all Mr. Ransome.

He was thinking that he had asked Fred Booty in to tea, and that he had
forgotten to say anything about it to his mother, and that Fred was
late, and that his father wouldn't like it.

* * * * *

He didn't. He didn't like it at all. He didn't like Fred Booty to begin
with, and when the impudent young monkey arrived after the others had
gone, and had to have fresh tea made for him, thus accentuating and
prolonging the unpleasantly, the intolerably festive hour, Mr. Ransome
felt that he had been tried to the utmost, and that courtesy and
forbearance had gone far enough for one Sunday. So he refused to speak