man, his hand had closed on
one of hers; happiness flooded his heart at her presence.

"But you know they hurt your eyes," Dick expostulated; he was new to
death, yet he could read the signs well enough to know his father was
dying.

"Harry can lie with his eyes shut," answered Mrs. Grant calmly. There
was no disagreeableness in her tone: her selfishness was on too gigantic
a scale for her ever to be disagreeable.

And Dick had turned up the lights and gone fuming from the room,
conscious for the time being of a sense of dislike for his mother's
perfection!

It soon faded though; he had been trained too thoroughly in his youth.
Once he said to Mabel hotly:

"Why does Mother cry for Dad? She did not really love him, and she just
delighted in buying all that expensive and becoming mourning."

And Mabel had surprised him by replying: "Mother does not really love
anyone but herself."

The remark sounded odd from Mabel, who spent her life slaving with
apparent devotion in her mother's service. She was a tall, rather
colourless girl, with big grey eyes and a quaint-shaped mouth that was
always very silent. She moved through the background of their lives
doing things for mother. She had always done that; Dick wondered
sometimes whether the soul within her would ever flame into open
rebellion, but it never did.

By the time Dick had passed his various exams, and was ready to take up
a practice somewhere, Mrs. Grant and Mabel had been practically
everywhere on the Continent.

"Money is running short," Mabel wrote crisply to Dick; "cannot you do
anything in the way of taking a house and settling down, so as to make a
home for Mother and me?"

Dick's ambitions lay in the direction of bachelor's diggings and work in
London. He thrust them aside and bought what was supposed to be a very
good and flourishing practice at Birmingham. Unfortunately Mrs. Grant
took a violent dislike to Birmingham. Their house was gloomy and got on
her nerves; the air, she said, was laden with smoke which irritated her
throat. She developed a cough, quite the most annoying sound that Dick
had ever imagined, and he was not easy to irritate. Mother coughed from
the time she woke till the time she went to sleep--coughed and
remembered old times and wept for Harry, who would at least have taken
care not to expose her to such overwhelming discomfort.

At the end of six months Dick threw up the practice in despair and
placed himself at her dispo