"I don't care if he did know it, Ranny. You'd a perfect right to live your own life. You'd a right to choose what you'd do and where you'd be. As it was, you never had any life of your own where your father was about. I can remember how it was, dear, if you don't. If you'd given in because he wanted you to; if you'd been boxed up with him down there from morning till night, you'd never have had any life at all. Not as much as _that_! And then, instead of caring for him as you did, you'd have got to hate him, and then he'd have hated you; and your mother would have been torn between you. That's how it would have been, and you knew it. Else you'd never have left him." "I say--fancy your knowin' all that!" "Of course I know it. I knew it all the time." "Who told you?" "You don't have to be told things like that, Ranny." The hand she was stroking moved from under her hand and caught it and grasped it tight. "Didn't I always know you were a dear?" she went on. "You said I didn't know anything about you. But I knew that much." "Yes--but--how did you know I cared for him?" "Oh, why--because--you couldn't have called him the Humming-bird and all those funny names you did if you hadn't cared. And, of course, he knew that too. That's what he wouldn't let on, dear--the lot he knew. It must have made him feel so nice and comfortable inside him to know that whatever he was to do you'd go on calling him a Humming-bird." "D'you think it did--reelly?" "Why--don't you remember how it used to make your mother smile? Well, then." Well, then, she seemed to say, it was all right. That was how she brought him round, to sanity when he thought his brain was going and to happiness when he felt it so improbable, not to say impossible, that he should ever be happy again. * * * * * A fortnight passed. In the three days following the death he had not thought once about his own concerns. He simply hadn't time to think of them. Every minute he could spare was taken up with the arrangements for his father's funeral. Sunday had been given over to mourning and remorse. It was Monday morning and the weeks following it that brought back the thought of his divorce. They brought it back, first, in all its urgency, as a thing vehemently and terribly desired, then as a thing, urgent indeed, but private and personal and, therefore, of secondary importance, a thing that must perforce stand over until the settlement of his father's affairs, till finally (emerging from the inextricable tangle in which it had become involved) it presented itself as it was, a thing hopeless and unattainable.