Pall-like silence draped the room, thick, awful silence. The father lifted his son from his lap to the floor, and turned him squarely around and looked him in the eyes imperiously. Many a time with some such screened but piercing power he, as a doctor, had scrutinized the faces of children to see whether they were aware that some vast tragedy of life was in the room with them. To keep them from knowing had often been his main care; seeing them know had been life's last pity; young children finding out the tragedies of their parents with one another—so many kinds of tragedies.
"You had better go now," he urged gently. Then an idea clamped his brain in its vise.
"And remember: while you are over there, you must try to behave with your best manners because you are going to stay in the house of a great lady. All the questions that you want to ask, ask me when you come back. Ask me!"
The boy standing before his father said with a strange quietness and stubbornness, probing him deeply through the eyes:—
"You haven't answered my last question yet, have you?"
"Not yet," said the doctor, with strange quietness also.
The boy had never before heard that tone from his father.
"It's sad being a doctor, isn't it?" he suggested, studying his father's expression.
"What do you know about sad? Who told you anything about sad?" muttered the doctor with new sadness now added to old sadness.
"Nobody had to tell me! I knew without being told."