“Well, you are come at last,” she said quietly.
“Yes, mother; but father, how is he?”
“Come and see him.”
I sprang up the stairs beside her. She opened the door softly, and bade me enter.
My father lay there dead.
“He waited for you all day,” said my mother, “and died not an hour ago. His last words were, ‘Charlie is late.’ Oh, Charlie, why did you not come sooner?”
Then she knelt with me beside my dead father. And, in that dark lonely chamber, that night, the turning-point of my life was reached.
Boys, I am an old man now; but, believe me, since that awful moment I have never, to my knowledge, dawdled again!