“Well, how much could I have?  Just for once not a crocus, but a tulip.  And of course not a violet.”

Mark always thought of the gas-jets as flowers.  The dimmest of all was the violet; followed by the crocus, the tulip, and the water-lily; the last a brilliant affair with wavy edges, and sparkling motes dancing about in the blue water on which it swam.

“No, no, dearest boy.  You really can’t have as much as that.  And now snuggle down and go to sleep again.  I wonder what made you wake up?”

Mark seized upon this splendid excuse to detain his mother for awhile.

“Well, it wasn’t ergzackly a dream,” he began to improvise.  “Because I was awake.  And I heard a terrible plump and I said ‘what can that be?’ and then I was frightened and. . . .”

“Yes, well, my sweetheart, you must tell Mother in the morning.”

Mark perceived that he had been too slow in working up to his crisis and desperately he sought for something to arrest the attention of his beloved audience.

“Perhaps my Guardian Angel was beside me all the time, because, look! here’s a feather.”

He eyed his mother, hoping against hope that she would pretend to accept his suggestion; but alas, she was severely unimaginative.

“Now, darling, don’t talk foolishly.  You know perfectly that is only a feather which has worked its way out of your pillow.”

“Why?”

The monosyllable had served Mark well in its time; but even as he fell back upon this stale resource he knew it had failed at last.

“I can’t stay to explain ‘why’ now; but if you try to think you’ll understand why.”

“Mother, if I don’t have any gas at all, will you sit with me in the dark for a little while, a tiny little while, and stroke my forehead where I bumped it on the knob of the bed?  I really did bump it quite hard—­I forgot to tell you that.  I forgot to tell you because when it was you I was so excited that I forgot.”

“Now listen, Mark.  Mother wants you to be a very good boy and turn over and go to sleep.  Father is very worried and very tired, and the Bishop is coming tomorrow.”

“Will he wear a hat like the Bishop who came last Easter?  Why is he coming?”

“No darling, he’s not that kind of bishop.  I can’t explain to you why he’s coming, because you wouldn’t understand; but we’re all very anxious, and you must be good and brave and unselfish.  Now kiss me and turn over.”

Mark flung his arms round his mother’s neck, and thrilled by a sudden desire to sacrifice himself murmured that he would go to sleep in the dark.

“In the quite dark,” he offered, dipping down under the clothes so as to be safe by the time the protecting candle-light wavered out along the passage and the soft closing of his mother’s door assured him that come what might there was only a wall between him and her.

“And perhaps she won’t go to sleep before I go to sleep,” he hoped.