“Not to-day. Lionel, listen.” Dearing drew the boy close to him, and tenderly stroked back his hair from his fine brow. “Mamma, you know, is terribly nervous about it. _Women_ are that way, aren't they? Men and boys, like us, know better. She can hardly sleep at night for thinking about it--even a little thing like that. We can do it now, and I can run over and tell her you are sleeping like a kitten in my big bed up-stairs, and she and Granny will be so glad. It won't hurt a bit, you know, for the medicine will make you sleep through it all.” A shadow of deep disappointment came into Lionel's expressive eyes. The warm color of life in his face faded into tense gravity, and they saw him clasp his little hands and wring them undecidedly. “And you think to-day is the best time?” he faltered, on the edge of refusal. “The very best of all, Lionel,” Dearing said, gently. “You wouldn't be afraid of me, would you?” The child stared dumbly. To Galt's accusing sense the world had never held a more desolate sentient being than this incipient repetition of himself. The child had proved that he knew no physical fear. To what, then, did he owe this evident clutch of horror? Could it be due to some psychic warning of approaching danger, or was the sensitive child telepathically governed by the morbid fears which, at that moment, were raging in the heart of his father? “Come, that's a good, nice boy!” Dearing urged. “I see you are going to be a brave little man.” “I'm not afraid it will _hurt_,” Lionel faltered, “but I don't like to be put to--to sleep.” “But it must be so, my boy,” the doctor said. “Come on. Mamma will see us in a minute and smell a mouse.” For a moment yet the child stood undecided, his gaze alternately on the two faces before him. Suddenly, while they waited and his eyes were resting in strange appeal on Galt, he asked: “Will you come, too?” A shock as if from some unknown force went through the man addressed, but, seeing no alternative, he answered: “If you wish it, yes, of course.” “And _you_ think I ought to--to do it?” “Yes,” Galt nodded, his head rocking like that of an automaton. “The doctor knows best.” “Well, then, I'll go,” the boy sighed, with another wistful look over the lawn. “I'll go.” As they were entering the house, by some strange mandate of fate or instinct the boy again took his father's hand, and Galt held it as they began to ascend the broad, walnut stairs. Argue as he would that the operation was only a most ordinary thing, to Galt's morbid state of mind it assumed the shape of a tragedy staged and enacted by the very imps of darkness. On the way up the boy tripped on the stair-carpeting and slipped and fell face downward. He was unhurt, but Galt raised him in his arms and bore him up the remainder of the steps into a big, light room off the corridor.