"My
boy, S-Sam, is a good boy. He comes up every day. Well, Lav-Lavendar,
sometimes I think I was--at fault?"
"I know you were, Benjamin. Have you told him so?"
"Gad-a-mercy! N-no!" snarled the other. "He would be too puffed up.
Won't do to make young people v-vain."
He "took notice," too, Simmons said, of the canaries; and he even
rolled out, stammeringly, some of his favorite verses. But, in spite
of all this, he was running down-hill; he knew it himself, and once he
told Dr. Lavendar that this business of dying made a man narrow. "I
th-think about it all the time," he complained. "Can't put my mind on
anything else. It's damned narrowing."
Yet William King said to Dr. Lavendar that he thought that if the old
man could be induced to talk of his grandson, he might rally. "He
never speaks of him," the doctor said, "but I am sure he is brooding
over him all the time. Once or twice I have referred to the boy, but
he pretends not to hear me. He's using up all his strength to bear the
idea that he is to blame, I wish I could tell him that he isn't," the
doctor ended, sighing.
They had met in the hall as William was coming down-stairs and Dr.
Lavendar going up. Simmons, who had been shuffling about with a
decanter and hospitable suggestions, had disappeared into the dining-
room.
"Well," said Dr. Lavendar, "why don't you tell him? Though in fact,
perhaps he is to blame in some way that we don't know? You remember,
he said he had 'angered the boy'?"
"No; that wasn't it," said William.
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