“Oh, please do!” she urged them.

So the gas was lighted, and they all went into the bedroom, where Anne tucked the children into their cribs.  She stayed there while the others went on their tour of inspection, patting her son’s small, warm body in the darkness, and listening with a smile to the visitor’s cheerful comments in kitchen and hallway, and Jim’s answering laugh.

When she came blinking out into the lighted dining-room, the men were upstairs, and Helma, to Anne’s astonishment, was showing in another caller,—­and another Charles Rideout, as Anne’s puzzled glance at the card in her hand, assured her.  This was a tall young man, a little dishevelled, in a big storm coat, and with dark rings about his eyes.

“I beg your pardon, madam,” said he, abruptly, “but was my father, Mr. Charles Rideout, here this afternoon?”

“Why, he’s upstairs with my husband now!” Anne said, strangely disquieted by the young man’s manner.

“Thank God!” said the newcomer, briefly.  And he wiped his forehead with his handkerchief, and drew a deep short breath.

“He—­I must apologize to you for breaking in upon you this way,” said young Rideout, “but he came out in the car this afternoon, and we didn’t know where he had gone.  He made the chauffeur wait at the corner at the bottom of the hill, and the fool man waited an hour before it occurred to him to telephone me at the house.  I came at once.”

“He’s been here all that time,” Anne said.  “He’s all right.  Your mother and father used to live here, you know, years ago.  In this same house.”

“Yes, I know we did.  I think I was born here,” said Charles Rideout, Junior.  “I had a sort of feeling that he had come here, as soon as Bates telephoned.  Dear old dad!  He and mother have told us about this place a hundred times!  They were talking about it for a couple of hours a few nights ago.”  He looked about the room as his father had done.  “They were very happy here.  There—­” he smiled a little bashfully at Anne—­“there never was a pair of lovers like mother and dad!” he said.  Then he cleared his throat.  “Did my father tell you—?” he began, and stopped.

“No,” Anne said, troubled.  He had told them a great deal, but not—­ she felt sure—­not this, whatever it was.

“That’s why we worried about him,” said his son, his honest, distressed eyes meeting hers.  “You see—­you see—­we’re in trouble at the house—­my mother—­my mother left us, last night—­”

“Dead?” whispered Anne.

“She’s been ill a good while,” said the young man, “but we thought—­ She’s been so ill before!  A day or two ago the rest of us knew it, and we wired for my married sister, but we couldn’t get dad to realize it.  He never left her, and he’s not been eating, and he’d tell all the doctors what serious sicknesses she’d gotten over before—­” And with a suddenly shaking lip and filling eyes, he turned his back on Anne, and went to the window.