He was a big man, and if I'd worked with him, we'd have done big things, bigger than he did, and that was big enough." "Do nothing till you see me," his mother had written in a postscript to her letter, and, with a moroseness at his heart and scorn of Barouche at his lips, he went slowly up to his mother's room.

At her door he paused.
But the woman was his mother, and it must be faced.

After all, she had kept faith ever since he was born.

He believed that.

She had been an honest wife ever since that fatal summer twenty-seven years before.
"She has suffered," he said, and knocked at her door.