"Yes, that is all; and he seems so much better now I think I might leave you to keep the rags on his head moistened. He is in a good sleep, and I don't want him disturbed, so you must be very quiet when you change the rags on his head, for the sleep will do him quite as much good as the lotion. You'll try to keep awake?" she added.
"Yes, mother, I'll do anything, so that you can go to poor Jessie," said Jack.
The two went up to the dimly lighted bedroom, and Jack watched his mother change the wet rags on his father's head, and felt sure he could do the same if he could only keep awake. This would be the most difficult part of his task, but he was determined that his father should not suffer through his neglect; and so he sat down with a resolute determination that however sleepy he might feel, he would resist the inclination to go to sleep.
He heard his mother close the street door as she went out, and listened to her quick footsteps as she went up the street, and then the silence seemed to descend and wrap the whole house in its folds, so that Jack could hear every breath his father drew, and noticed the regularity with which every breath came and went. Then he began thinking of all that had happened that night, and what he had heard from the dying woman about her life being wasted.
He knew it was true, for had not she and Jessie been the byword of the neighbourhood? Every decent mother had warned her girls to keep away from Jessie Collins; and now it seemed that it was the fault of the way in which Jessie had been brought up rather than her own, for his mother said Jessie had very good points in her character, and had made the most of what she had learned at school.
Thinking of this kept him from going to sleep, and his thoughts travelled from Jessie to his sister Fanny, and he could not help wondering what sort of girl she would have been if she had had the same chances as Jessie, and no more.
"The way people are taught and brought up has a great deal to do with what they are afterwards, but it isn't everything," was the conclusion Jack arrived at after a good deal of pondering; and then he noticed that his father was not sleeping so peacefully, and he remembered that he had not yet put fresh cool rags on his head, and at once squeezed those that were in the basin of lotion, and took off the hot almost dry ones, to be replaced by those that were cool and moist.
In a few minutes he noticed that this change had restored his father's peaceful breathing, and he felt repaid for all the trouble it had cost him to keep awake. He did not wait so long before changing the damp rags the next time; and soon after daylight he heard his mother put the key in the street door, and then he crept down to meet her.
"How is father now?" she asked anxiously, as he went down the stairs.
"All right. Just as you left him. He has not woke once."