Poor Tom! He had not had so many nights of triumph in his life that this should be his last, but he was soon to start upon a journey from which even Anne’s imperious will was powerless to call him back. She helping him, he struggled hard against pneumonia and made a better fight with death than he had ever made with life, but his course was run and the school had not reopened after the holidays when Tom Branstone ceased to fight. It seemed that, on the night of the Conversazione, he had had his hour, and “men must endure Their going hence even as their coming hither: Ripeness is all.” It did not come to Sam as the shattering of his world--only the death of Anne could have done that--but certainly as a stunning blow. It was the first time that he had come intimately close to death and he missed death’s beauty and its peace. He saw too well its ugliness and the detail of a burial. It hurt, not because Tom Branstone had had but little joy in life, but because he died too soon to see the glory of his son. In after years, Sam Branstone would have liked to recall how Tom’s death softened him, how he melted to tears before that waxen face and lovingly bought flowers to put inside the coffin. It wouldn’t do. It didn’t fit the facts. He knew that, honestly, he had been angry with his father for dying, especially for dying in the holidays. It spoiled the holidays and it robbed Sam of the day’s holiday he would have had for the funeral had Tom had the gumption to die in termtime. He resented his father’s death as he would have resented an unjust thrashing from him--if Tom Branstone ever thrashed anybody. Tom had died prematurely, while he was still useful to Sam. He had bilked Sam, and Sam was angry. Not only had Tom died too soon to see the glory of his son, but his son’s glory was seriously jeopardized by the breadwinner’s death. Sam had, in his innermost soul, given up the idea of Oxford; he was not apt enough at classics, but he was far from admitting it now. It was Tom’s death, and that alone, which deprived him of that crown. Anne felt it deeply. She had loved Tom with something like mother-love as well as wife’s. If she had been hard with him, it was for his good, and he as well as she had known that her hardness was like the hardness of a crab’s shell, hiding a tender place inside. Now that he was dead she could hide her grief as she had hidden her love, and went about her business soberly. Soberly she drew her money from the Sick and Burial Society and soberly she spent it on “black” for Sam, for George, Madge and herself, doing those things which Tom would have expected to be done to dignify his death, but adding nothing that would make his funeral a neighbours’ raree-show.