"Well, Jerome, you're a man now, and you know best about such things. You'll have to take care of your old mother before long, anyway, till she--" She took off her spectacles and wiped away their moisture on the stocking she was darning, and then she raised her eyes, their pale depths dim with tears, and through them she smiled at him. He got up and kissed her, and she held him to her, pressing his cheek close to her withered one, patting his hands clumsily, awkwardly, for she had never had time to cultivate the luxurious graces of affection. She did not, however, give way long to her emotion. She urged him to go to bed, because of his cold, and in the new burst of affection the evening had developed in his heart, he obeyed. She tucked him in his bed as if he had been a little boy again, and said good night. He lay there a long time, warm, perspiring, comfortable, his election as he felt at last assured. But he could not get to sleep. For from his mother's room there came to him the sound of her quavering, aged voice, in hoarse whispers, and he knew that she was kneeling by her bed, praying. XVII Garwood found Rankin sitting in the lobby of the Cassell House, stiff in the highly glossed linen his wife decreed for his Sunday wear, his face cleanly shaved and showing its pink under the powder the barber had left on it. He had had his hair cut, too, and his cropped curls, because they had been combed by the barber, gave him the appearance of having been trimmed and made over in another fashion. He had got some of the ashes of his cigar on his waistcoat, as he lay deep in a big chair with the Sunday papers piled in his lap, and when he noticed Garwood, he also noticed the ashes, and in his haste to brush them off, he could only wheeze out an inadequate greeting between the teeth that clenched his cigar. Garwood did not feel the satisfaction he had anticipated for that moment, when he said: "Well, Jim, you may rest easy, I can take care of that little matter we were talking of last night." Although Garwood spoke with a politician's generality, Rankin, before he replied, glanced over his shoulders with a politician's wariness which is like the wariness of a hunted savage. "Well, that's all right then," Rankin answered, blinking his eyes because the smoke from his cigar had persisted in creeping into them. "Didn't have any trouble about it, did you?" "No, none to speak of," said Garwood. He laughed, but it was a laugh with more of rue than mirth in it. "It only means a little more debt, that's all." "Well," said Rankin, nipping the wet and ragged end of his cigar with his teeth, "so long as you don't have to mortgage the roof over your head you're all right." The words of course struck a pain through Garwood's heart, but he gave his laugh again as he answered: "Well, I reckon it won't come to that."