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“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.

“Ah!” said Anne, pitifully. And for a full moment there was silence.

Then Charles Rideout, the younger, came back to her, pushing his handkerchief into his coat pocket; and with a restored self-control.

“Too bad to bother you with our troubles,” he said, with a little smile like his father’s. “To us, of course, it seems like the end of the world, but I am sorry to distress YOU! Dad just doesn’t seem to grasp it, he hasn’t been excited, you know, but he doesn’t seem to understand. I don’t know that any of us do!” he finished simply.

“Here they are!” Anne said warningly, as the two other men came down the stairs.

“Hello, Dad!” said young Rideout, easily and cheerfully, “I came to bring you home!”

“This is MY boy, Mrs. Warriner,” said his father; “you see he’s turned the tables, and is looking after me! I’m glad you came, Charley. I’ve been telling your good husband, Mrs. Warriner,” he said, in a lower tone, “that we–that I–“

“Yes, I know!” Anne said, with her ready tenderness, and a little gasp like a child’s.

“So you will realize what impulse brought me here to-day,” the older man went on; “I was talking to my wife of this house only a day or two ago.” His voice had become almost inaudible, and the three young people knew he had forgotten them. “Only a day or two ago,” he repeated musingly. And then, to his son, he added wistfully, “I don’t seem to get it through my head, my boy. For a while to-day, I forgot–I forgot. The heart–” he said, with his little old-world touch of dignity–“the heart does not learn things as quickly as the mind, Mrs. Warriner.”

Anne had found something wistful and appealing in his smile before, now it seemed to her heartbreaking. She nodded, without speaking.

“Dear old Dad,” said Charles Rideout, affectionately. “You are tired out. You’ve been doing too much, sir, you want sleep and rest.”

“Surely–surely,” said his father, a little heavily. Father and son shook hands with Jim and Anne, and the older man said gravely, “God bless you both!” as he and his son went down the wet path, in the shaft of light from the hall door. At the gate the boy put his arm tenderly about his father’s shoulders.

“Oh, Anne, Anne,” said her husband as she clung to him when the door was shut, “I couldn’t live one day without YOU, my dearest! But don’t–don’t cry. Don’t let it make you blue,–he HAD his happiness, you know,–he has his children left!”

Anne tightened her arms about his neck.

“I am crying a little for sorrow, Jim, dearest!” she sobbed, burying her face in his shoulder. “But I believe it is mostly–mostly for joy and gratitude, Jim!”