At Coventry he had a dreary wait for half-an-hour until the midnight express for the south lumbered in and stopped on signal. As soon as he had boarded the through train, he got into his berth, for he was worn out with the wearisome journey from Monday Port and with the excitement of the last seven hours. But he could not sleep for a long time. When at last he did fall into a fitful slumber, constantly disturbed by the jolts and jars of the rushing train, it was to dream bad dreams. Once it seemed to him, in the dazed state between sleeping and waking, that he was lying in his little bed at Low Deering, that he was still a little boy of fourteen, and that the last four years at Deal had been only a dream.... At Low Deering Tony found things almost as bad as he had feared. His father, a genial, charming, irresponsible creature—the unaccountable wild olive that grows now and then on the stock of the good olive tree—had rather more deeply than usual—for the same sort of thing had happened before—plunged his family into distress. He had ventured all his available capital and more that he had borrowed, on the security of his extravagant hopes and good intentions, from his wife; staked it in a case where he stood to win twenty-fold or quite overwhelmingly lose; and, as not unfrequently happens, had lost. Then had followed, as Tony could remember the horror of it all at an earlier period of his boyhood, a trying disappearance and a return in a mood of black melancholy and idle remorse. But the worst was over by the time he reached home. Victor Deering, thanks to his father’s stern but tender patience and his wife’s unfailing much-tried devotion, was slowly recovering his normal health, his irrepressible spirits, his habitual weaving of futile plans and nursing of quixotic hopes. But the process this time had cost his family a good deal more than its meager income could pay for and had sacrificed Mrs. Deering’s health to worry and distress. For weeks she had been lying in a state of nervous exhaustion, from which the physician at last thought she might be rallied if her wish were granted and Tony, her only child, might be with her. And so he had been sent for. During those two hot months of the southern spring Tony devoted himself to his mother, a devotion that was only relaxed when later, the old general having scraped together enough for the purpose, the family removed for the summer to the cooler climate of a resort in the North Carolina mountains. The mother grieved not a little for her boy’s interrupted school days—she guessed at the sacrifice Tony’s cheerfulness hid,—but Tony and the General knew that his return had saved her health if not her life.