The old man sat there for quite a while, staring before him. Then, rather suddenly, the thought came to him that he might be able to find these people, especially that boy—though of course he wouldn’t be a boy any longer. He’d be along seventeen or eighteen, he should think. He looked at the letter again. Montreal, and she gave the street address; but that was years ago. He might try it though, just to see. Charles Michael Haworth. He rather liked the name. That evening he wrote a letter to the address given and sent it out to the nearest mailbox. But in the night he got to thinking the thing over so intensely that sleep was impossible. It came to him then that the letter business was a waste of time. He got nervous, too, about the matter of death, the thought of which seldom bothered him. And on top of everything his dissolute nephew came lurching into the house about four-thirty in the morning, banging the heavy front door after him so that the building shuddered, careening against furniture, and finally stumbling up the stairway, all the while emitting a stream of disconnected profanity. This was the finishing touch for old man Cripps. He rolled himself out of bed and made one bull rush—in his nightgown and bare feet—into the upper hall, meeting the astonished inebriate near the head of the stairs. Seizing him by the collar with both hands, he shook him back and forth, then dragged him bumping and rolling down the stairs, through the great entrance hall, out of the front door, across the entrance portico, and from there heaved him sprawling into the roadway. For one instant the enraged old man stood looking at the dark mass lying there at the bottom of the steps, then turning with a sudden start he charged back into the house and up the stairs again and through the upper hall to his nephew’s bedroom, where he seized with frenzied clutchings all the clothing he could find in drawers, closets, on chairs, and on the floor, which he forthwith pitched out through the doorway into the hall, prancing back and forth across the room a dozen times or more to do it. Where the old gentleman got his wind for all this would be a serious problem in physics and chemistry, for he was heavily built, underexercised, and with a tobacco heart. Anyway, he did it. As soon as he’d cleared out everything he could find he rushed out and down the hall to his own room, and shoved in every bell push in the place, and kept on shoving until the chauffeur came running up the stairs, followed by both maids and the cook, and shortly after by the head gardener and his ten-year-old son from their cottage near. All were clutching together such garments as they’d hastily snatched up and thrown on over their night clothes.