Goodnight.

God be with thee, my son!" I left him.

I was happy.

Once I had never expected my old father and I would have got on together so well, or loved one another so dearly.
In the middle of the night Jael came into my room, and sat down on my bed's foot, looking at me.

I had been dreaming strangely, about my own childish days, and about my father and mother when we were young.
What Jael told me--by slow degrees, and as tenderly as when she was my nurse years ago--seemed at first so unreal as to be like a part of the dream.
At ten o'clock, when she had locked up the house, she had come as usual to the parlour door, to tell my father it was bed-time.