He turned his frightened eyes away from what he saw in his father’s eyes. Quietly, since it was an old, old story to him, RoBards told him the truth, and Keith wrung his hands to keep from startling the passengers in the crowded car with the mad gestures of protest he would else have flung out. He wanted to charge the clouds and battle in his mother’s behalf. But when he entered her room he was as brave and calm as at a dress parade. He smiled and caressed and spoke flatteries that cut his throat and burned his lips. He hurried back to disband his regiment, then brought Frances and his son up to Tuliptree with him, and established himself in the nearest room to his mother’s. He tucked her in and babied her as she had babied him when she was younger than he was now. Patty’s famous hair was her only remaining pride, the inheritance from the Patty Jessamine who had combed and brushed and coiled it and wrapped it in strange designs about her little head. She was always fondling it as if it were a fairy turban, a scarf of strange silk. Even in her bitterest paroxysms she would not tear at her hair. The nurse would braid it and draw two long cables down her shoulders and praise it, and Patty would not brag a little, saying: “It is nice, isn’t it?” The fate that took away every other comfort and beauty and every last luxury spared her tresses. They had not even turned white except for certain little streaks—a fine line of silver here and there that glistened like the threads of the dome-spider’s gossamer shining in the morning dew when the sunbeams just rake the lawn. She would lay her hair against her cheeks and against her lips and she would hold it up to RoBards to kiss, and laugh a wild little laugh. He loved it as she did, and thought it miraculous that so many strands of such weave should be spun from that head of hers to drip about her beauty. Then she would forget it in another call to martyrdom. Her bravery astounded her husband and her brave son. It was the courage of the ancient heretic women who had smiled amid the flames of the slow green fagots that zealots chose for their peculiar wretchedness. Sometimes she would seem to be whispering something to herself and RoBards would bend down to catch the words. Usually she was crooning that song: “We-e-e-eave no mo-o-ore silks, ye Ly-y-y-ons loo-oo-ooms. To deck our girls for ga-a-ay delights.” The war was over, the looms were astream with silks again, but not for Patty Jessamine RoBards. One night when he had fallen asleep from sheer fag, drained like an emptied reservoir, RoBards was wakened by her seizure upon his arm. It terrified him from some dream of a lawsuit. He was a moment or two in realizing that it was Patty who had seized him. The lamp had gone out, the dawn was stealing in. She was babbling: “I can’t stand it any more. Not another day! Oh, God, not another day! Don’t ask me that, dear God!”