"Yes—yes! I see. You'd exonerate her. Good boy! Very proper." And indeed the doctor had felt, as the words passed his lips, that he was rather a horrid liar. But the point didn't matter. Fenwick laughed it off: "Just you take my advice, and refer the matter to the kitten the last day you're here. Monday, won't it be? And don't think about it!"
"Oh no! I'm a philosophical sort of chap, I am! Never in extremes. Good-night!"
"I see. Sperat infestis metuit secundis alteram sortem bene præparatum pectus—Horace." Fenwick ran this through in a breath; and the doctor, a little hazy in school-memories of the classics, said, "What's that?" and began translating it—"The bosom well prepared for either lot, fears...." Fenwick caught him up and completed the sentence:
"Fears what is good, and hopes for what is not. Cut away to bed, old chap, and sleep sound...." Then he paused a moment, as he saw the doctor looking a question at him intently, and just about to speak it. He answered it before it came:
"No, no! Nothing more. I mean to forget all about it, and take my life as it stands. Bother Mr. Harrisson!" He dropped his voice to say this; then raised it again. "Don't you fret about me, doctor. Remember, I'm Algernon Fenwick! Good-night!"
"Good-night!" And then the doctor, with the remains of heart-turmoil in him, and a brain reeling, more or less, went up into what he conceived to be an empty dark room, and was disconcerted
by an ill-used murmur in the darkness—a meek, submissive voice of one accustomed to slights:
"I told her to blow it out and go to bed. It is all—quite—right, my dear. So do not complain. Now help me with my things, and I will get to bed."
"My dear mother! I am so sorry. I had no idea you had not gone long ago!"
"My dear!—it does not matter in the least now. What is done, is done. Be careful with the grease over my work. These candles drop dreadfully, unless you hold them exactly upright. And gutter. Now give me your arm, and I will go to bed. I think I shall sleep." And the worthy woman was really—if her son could only have got his eyes freed from the scales of domestic superstition, and seen it—intensely happy and exultant at this fiendish little piece of discomfort-mongering. She had scored; there was no doubt of it. She was even turning it over in her own mind whether it would not bear repetition at a future time; and quite intended, if so, to enjoy herself over it. Now the doctor was contrite and heavy at heart at his cruel conduct; walking about—just think!—and talking over his own affairs while his self-sacrificing mother was sitting in the dark, with the lamp out! To be sure there was no visible reason why she should have had it put out, except as a picturesque and imaginative way of rubbing her altruism into its nearest victim. Unless, indeed, it was done in order that the darkened window should seem to announce to the returning truant that she had gone to bed, and to lull his mind to unconsciousness of the ambush that awaited him.