Lester said to himself, shivering, “What a ghastly thing to have sensitive, helpless human beings absolutely in the power of other human beings! Absolute, unquestioned power! Nobody can stand that. It’s cold poison. How many wardens of prisons are driven sadistically mad with it!” He recoiled from it with terror. “You have to be a superman to be equal to it.” In the silent room he heard it echoing solemnly, “That’s what it is to be a parent.” He had been a parent for thirteen years before he thought of it. He looked over the edge of his bed at Stephen and abased himself silently. The child sat motionless, clasping Teddy, his face bent and turned away so that Lester could not see its expression. His attitude was that of some one thinking deeply. Well, reflected Lester, there was certainly good reason for the taking of thought by everybody concerned! He let his head fall back on the pillow and, staring up, began for the first time since his fall to think connectedly about something other than his own wretchedness. For the first time the ugly blemishes on the ceiling were not like blotches in his own brain. Presently he forgot them altogether. That sudden contact with Stephen’s utterly unsuspected suffering had been like dropping his fingers unawares upon red-hot iron. His reaction had been the mere reflex of the intolerable pain it gave him. Now, in the long quiet of his sick-room, he set himself to try to understand what it meant. So that had been at the bottom of Stephen’s fierceness and badness in those last days of the old life. So it had been black despair which had filled the child’s heart and not merely an inexplicable desire to make trouble for his mother. For Heaven’s sakes, how far off the track they had been! But however could they have guessed at the real cause of the trouble? What possessed the child to keep such a perverse silence? Why hadn’t he told somebody? How could they know if he never said a word. He thought again of the scene in the bathroom that last morning and saw again Stephen’s wistful face looking up into his. Stephen had _tried_ to tell him. And those sacred itemized accounts of Willing’s Emporium had stopped his mouth. But Evangeline was always on hand. Why hadn’t Stephen.... Without a word, with a complete perception that filled all his consciousness, Lester knew why Stephen had never tried to tell his mother. And yet--his sense of fairness made him take up the cudgels for Eva--it hadn’t been such an unreasonable idea of hers. Teddy was certainly as dirty as it was possible for anything to be. You have to keep children clean whether they like it or not. Suppose Teddy had been played with by a child who had scarlet fever? They’d have to have him cleaned, wouldn’t they? He’d gone too far, yielded to a melodramatic impulse when he’d promised Stephen so solemnly they’d never have anything done to Teddy that he didn’t like.