Plump, and yet not large, her figure and her face were formed for gaiety and charm. Her little nose was uptilted like Ranny's; but something that was not gaiety, but pathos, had dragged down and made tremulous the corners of a mouth that had once been tilted too--a flowerlike mouth, of the same tender texture as her face, a face that was once one wide-open, innocent pink flower. Now it was washed out and burnt with the courses of her tears. Worry had fretted her soft forehead into lines and twisted her eyebrows in an expression as of permanent surprise at life's handiwork. And under them her dim-blue eyes, red-lidded, looked out with the same sorrow and dismay. There was nothing left of her beauty but her exuberant light-brown hair, which she dressed high on her head with a twist and a topknot piteously reminiscent of gaiety and charm. She laid her hand on the knob of the left-hand inner door. "He's in the dispensin'-room," she said. Ranny turned round. His features tilted slightly, compelled by something preposterous in the vision she had evoked. "Whatever game is he playin' there?" A faint flicker passed over his mother's face, as if it pleased her that he could talk in that way. "Prescription," she said, and paused between her words to let it sink into him. "Makin' it up, he is. Old Mr. Beesley's heart mixture." "My Hat!" said Ranny. He was impressed by the gravity of the situation. There were all sorts of things, such as toothbrushes, patent medicines, babies' comforters, that Ranny's father with a Headache, or Ranny himself or his mother could be trusted to dispense at a moment's notice. But the drug strophanthus, prescribed for old Mr. Beesley, was not one of them. It was tricky stuff. He knew all about it; Mercier had told him. Whether it was to do Mr. Beesley good or not would depend on the precise degree and kind of Ranny's father's Headache. "I've never known your father's Headache so bad as it is to-night," said Ranny's mother. "As for makin' up prescriptions, sufferin' as He is, He's not fit for it. He's not fit for it, Ranny." That was as near as she could go. "Of course he isn't." (They had to keep it up together.) But Ranny's mother felt that she had gone too far. "He ought to be in His bed--" "Of course he ought," said Ranny, tenderly. "And He would be if it wasn't for that Mercier." Thus subtly did she intimate that it was not his father but Mercier whose behavior was reprehensible. "P'r'aps you'll go to him, Ranny?" "Hadn't we better wait for Mercier?" (Old Mr. Beesley's mixture was a case for Mercier.) "Him? Goodness knows when he'll be in. And it's not likely that y'r father'll have him interferin' with him. They're sendin' at ten past eleven, and it's five past now."