"Mother, let me burn it, so that no eyes but ours shall ever see!" "Burn it? Burn the last letter I may ever have from him? Give it to me!" And she pressed it to her bosom. Harry hung his head in a long and wretched silence. "We must forget him, mother," he said at last. "Harry, he was a good father to you, he loved you dearly. He was mad when he did what he has done. You must never say that again." "I meant we must forget what he has done----" "Ah God! if I could!" "And only think of him as he used to be." "Yes; yes; we will try." "It would be easier--don't you think--if we never spoke of this?" "We never will, unless we must." "Let us think that we just failed like other people. But, mother, I will work all my life to pay off everybody! I will work for you till I drop. Goodness knows what at; but I learnt to work for fun in Africa, I am ready to work in earnest, and, thank God, I have all my life before me." "You are twenty-one to-day!" "Yes, I start fair in every way." "That this should be your twenty-first birthday! My boy--my boy!" * * * * * The long May twilight deepens into night; the many windows of the red-brick block are lit up one by one; and the many lives go on. Below, at the curb, a doctor's brougham and a hansom are waiting end to end; and from that top flat a young couple come scuttling down the stone stairs, he in a crush-hat, she with a flower in her hair, and theirs is the hansom. The flat below has similar tenants, but here the doctor is, and the young man paces his desolate parlour with a ghastly face. And in the flat below that it is Weber's Last Waltz once more, and nothing else, by the hour together. And in the flat below that--the flat that would have gone into one room of their old home--Harry Ringrose and his mother are still steeling themselves and one another to face the future and to live down the past. The light has been lowered in their front room and transferred for a space to the tiny dining-room at the back, which looks down into the building's well, but now it is the front windows which stand out once more. Twelve o'clock comes, and there is a tinkle of homing hansoms (the brougham has gone away masterless), and the public-house at the corner empties noisily, but the light in those front windows remains the brightest in the mansions. And Weber is done with at last; but the two voices below go on and on and on into the night; nor do they cease when their light shifts yet again into the front bedroom. It is two in the morning, and the young couple have come home crumpled from their dance, and their feet drag dreadfully on the stairs, and the doctor has taken their hansom, and the young man below them is drunk with joy, when Harry Ringrose kisses his mother for the twentieth last time and really goes. But he is too excited to sleep. In half-an-hour he creeps back into the passage. Her light is still burning. He goes in. "You spoke of Innes, mother?"