“He’s no business to behave as if it was Papa’s fault,” said Harriett. She had no patience with the odious little man. She thought of her father’s face, her father’s body, straight and calm, and his soul so far above that mean trouble of Mr. Hancock’s, that vulgar shame. Yet inside him he fretted. And, suddenly, he began to sink. He turned faint after the least exertion and had to leave off going to Mr. Hichens. And by the spring of eighteen eighty he was upstairs in his room, too ill to be moved. That was just after Mr. Hichens had bought the house and wanted to come into it. He lay, patient, in the big white bed, smiling his faint, amused smile when he thought of Mr. Hichens. It was awful to Harriett that her father should be ill, lying there at their mercy. She couldn’t get over her sense of his parenthood, his authority. When he was obstinate, and insisted on exerting himself, she gave in. She was a bad nurse, because she couldn’t set herself against his will. And when she had him under her hands to strip and wash him, she felt that she was doing something outrageous and impious; she set about it with a flaming face and fumbling hands. “Your mother does it better,” he said gently. But she could not get her mother’s feeling of him as a helpless, dependent thing. Mr. Hichens called every week to inquire. “Poor man, he wants to know when he can have his house. Why _will_ he always come on my good days? He isn’t giving himself a chance.” He still had good days, days when he could be helped out of bed to sit in his chair. “This sort of game may go on for ever,” he said. He began to worry seriously about keeping Mr. Hichens out of his house. “It isn’t decent of me. It isn’t decent.” Harriett was ill with the strain of it. She had to go away for a fortnight with Lizzie Pierce, and Sarah Barmby stayed with her mother. Mrs. Barmby had died the year before. When Harriett got back her father was making plans for his removal. “Why have you all made up your minds that it’ll kill me to remove me? It won’t. The men can take everything out but me and my bed and that chair. And when they’ve got all the things into the other house they can come back for the chair and me. And I can sit in the chair while they’re bringing the bed. It’s quite simple. It only wants a little system.” Then, while they wondered whether they might risk it, he got worse. He lay propped up, rigid, his arms stretched out by his side, afraid to lift a hand because of the violent movements of his heart. His face had a patient, expectant look, as if he waited for them to do something. They couldn’t do anything. There would be no more rallies. He might die any day now, the doctor said. “He may die any minute. I certainly don’t expect him to live through the night.” Harriett followed her mother back into the room. He was sitting up in his attitude of rigid expectancy; no movement but the quivering of his night-shirt above his heart.