ii

To Jenny, coming with every precautionary quietness into the house, the sight came as the greatest shock.  She found the kitchen door ajar, heard voices, and then burst upon the three feebly illumined figures.  Emmy, still in her out-of-doors coat, knelt beside Alf upon the floor; and between them, with a face terribly grey, lay Pa, still in his old red nightshirt, with one of his bare feet showing.  The stained shirt, upon which the marks of water, looking in this light perfectly black, might have been those of blood, filled Jenny with horror.  It was only when she saw both Emmy and Alf staring mutely at her that she struggled against the deadly faintness that was thickening a veil of darkness before her eyes.  It was a dreadful moment.

“Hullo Jen!” Alf said.  “Look here!”

“I thought you must be in bed,” Emmy murmured.  “Isn’t it awful!”

Not a suspicion!  Her heart felt as if somebody had sharply pinched it.  They did not know she had been out!  It made her tremble in a sudden flurry of excited relief.  She quickly came forward, bending over Pa.  Into his cheeks there had come the faintest wash of colour.  His eyelids fluttered.  Jenny stooped and took his hand, quite mechanically, pressing it between hers and against her heart.  And at that moment Pa’s eyes opened wide, and he stared up at her.  With Alf at his side and Emmy behind him, supporting his head upon her lap, Pa could see only Jenny, and a twitching grin fled across his face—­a grin of loving recognition.  It was succeeded by another sign of recovery, a peculiar fumbling suggestion of remembered cunning.

“Jenny, my dearie,” whispered Pa, gaspingly.  “A good ... boy!” His eyes closed again.

Emmy looked in quick challenge at Alf, as if to say “You see how it is!  She comes in last, and it’s her luck that he should see her.... Always the same!” And Jenny was saying, very low: 

“It looks to me as if you’d been a bad boy!”

“Can’t be with him all the time!” Emmy put in, having reached a point of general self-defence in the course of her mental explorations.  She was recovering from her shock and her first horrible fears.

“Shall we get him to bed?  Carry him back in there?” Jenny asked.  “The floor’s soaking wet.”  She had not to receive any rebuke:  Emmy, although shaken, was reviving in happiness and in graciousness with each second’s diminution of her dread.  She now agreed to Pa’s removal; and they all stumbled into his bedroom and laid him upon his own bed.  Alf went quickly back again to the kitchen for the brandy; and presently a good dose of this was sending its thrilling and reviving fire through Pa’s person.  Emmy had busied herself in making a bandage for his wounded head; and Jenny had arranged him more comfortably, drying his chest and laying a little towel between his body and the night-short lest he should take cold.  Pa was very complacently aware of these ministrations, and by the time they were in full order completed he was fast asleep, having expressed no sort of contrition for his naughtiness or for the alarm he had given them all.