A long pause. She noticed little things about him. The proud, handsome corners of his mouth had loosened; his eyelids didn't fit nicely as they used to do; they hung slack from the eyebone. "You care more for Roddy than you do for Mark," he said. "I don't care for him half so much. But I'm sorry for him. You can't be sorry for Mark.... Roddy wants me and Mark doesn't. He wants nobody but Mamma." "He knows what he wants.... Well. It's my fault. I should have known what I wanted. I should have taken you a year ago." "If you had," she said, "it would have been all over now." "I wonder, would it?" For the life of her she couldn't imagine what he meant. When she got home she found her mother folding up the work in the work-basket. "Well, anyhow," Mamma said, "you've laid in a good stock of underclothing." VI. She was sitting in the big leather chair in the consulting-room. The small grey-white window panes and the black crooked bough of the apple tree across them made a pattern in her brain. Dr. Charles stood before her on the hearthrug. She saw his shark's tooth, hanging sharp in the snap of his jaws. He was powerful, savage and benevolent. He had told her what was wrong with Roddy. "What--does--it--mean?" The savage light went out of his eyes. They were dull and kind under his red shaggy eyebrows. "It means that you won't have him with you very long, Mary." That Roddy would die. That Roddy would die. _Roddy_. That was what he had come home for. "He ought never to have gone out with his heart in that state. It beats me how he's pulled through those five years. Five weeks of it were enough to kill him.... Jem Alderson must have taken mighty good care of him." Jem Alderson. She remembered. The big shoulders, the little screwed up eyes, the long moustaches, the good, gladiator face. Jem Alderson had taken care of him. Jem Alderson had cared. "I don't know what your mother could have been thinking of to let him go." "Mamma doesn't think of things. It wasn't her fault. She didn't know. Uncle Edward and Uncle Victor made him." "They ought to be hung for it." "They didn't know, either. It was my fault. _I_ knew." It seemed to her that she had known, that she had known all the time, that she remembered knowing. "Did he tell you?" "He didn't tell anybody.... Did he know?" "Yes, Mary. He came to me to be overhauled. I told him he wasn't fit to go." "I did _try_ to stop him." "Why?" He looked at her sharply, as if he were trying to find out something, to fix responsibility. "Because I _knew_." "You couldn't have known if nobody told you." "I did know. If he dies I shall have killed him. I ought to have stopped him. I was the only one who knew." "You couldn't have stopped him. You were only a child yourself when it happened. If anybody was to blame it was his mother."