Then Cosmo himself added, this time quite gently: “You might kill yourself! You were not allowed to move after your medicine.... You must let me do everything.” [Illustration: THE UNEXPECTED APPEARANCE OF MR BURDEN] The old man did not resist at all; he was led across the room by Cosmo, past Mr Barnett, at whom he feebly smiled, and from whom he received no smile in return but still that powerful indignant glance, and as he stumbled by: “I was asleep,” he murmured. For the only time in his life he was not believed. Cosmo led him upstairs again to his room. His father slept again, but Cosmo waited till the nurse returned. He took her aside and spoke to her in such a fashion that she determined to leave that roof—a decision she wisely postponed. Then he went down, bracing himself as best he could to find Mr Barnett. To his very considerable annoyance, Mr Barnett had gone. He ran down to the gate and looked up Alexandrovna Road; but, if the distant Panhard he saw was that of the financier, it had gone too far for recall. He went back to the house, up the drive, moodily; he stood gazing for some minutes at the chair in the conservatory, he paced and calculated the distance between it and the place where he and Mr Barnett had sat; then he went and stood by the window and looked out for a long time in silence, wondering at, and misreading, everything. * * * * * With that unpleasant little episode, a mischance which only the imperfect sympathies of the various parties to it had exaggerated, Mr Burden appeared to recover in a final manner. His rapid restoration was due, in part, to the physicians, who found his symptoms far easier to analyse under the effects of the drug than they had been during the complex reactions of his convalescence; and in part to the curious obstinacy of the old man himself who, with a vivid memory of their last experiment, successfully refused to touch another spoonful of medicine. Under the combined influence of their science and his mother-wit, he was within three days dressed and about the house. Within a week he was walking out daily, and soon manifested that revolt against restraint, which is but the return of an active and working brain to its normal functions. As Mr Burden could spend more and more of the day downstairs, Cosmo rightly thought it less and less his duty to waste his time at home. Such was his zeal in his new-found opportunities for work, that he would leave the house before his father had been permitted to rise; and the recreation necessary after a long day, not to speak of private calls which had to be made upon other members of the original syndicate, commonly prevented his return until long after his father was asleep. In these days, therefore, which just preceded Mr Burden’s reappearance in the City, he saw but little of his son.