By nearly
closing his eyes he could see everything double, so that there were
ten stars and two red lights; he was trying to make everything come
treble when the gate clicked and he saw his father's shadow. He was
delighted with this happy end to a tiresome day, and as he ran
through the passage he called out to mother to say that father was
back. Mother did not answer, but he heard a bit of noise in the
kitchen as he opened the front door. He said "Good evening" in the grown-up voice that father encouraged,
but father slipped in and shut the door without saying a word. Every
night when he came back from the post-office he brought Jack the
gummed edgings off the sheets of stamps, and Jack held out his hand
for them as a matter of course. Automatically father felt in his
overcoat pocket and pulled out a great handful. "Take care of them,
they're the last you'll get," he said; but when Jack asked why, his
father looked at him with the same hopeless expression that he had
found in his mother's eyes a short while before. Jack felt a little
cross that every one should be so stupid. When they went into the kitchen everybody looked very strange, and
Jack sat down in the corner and listened for an explanation. As a
rule the conversation of the grown-up people did not amuse him, but
tonight he felt that something had happened, and that if he kept
quiet he might find out what it was. He had noticed before that when
the grown-ups talked they always said the same things over and over
again, and now they were worse than usual. Father said, "It's no
good, I've got to go through it;" the mill-woman said, "Whatever made
you do it, George?" And mother said, "Nothing will ever happen to me
again!" They all went on saying these things till Jack grew tired of
listening, and started plaiting his stamp-paper into a mat. If you
did it very neatly it was almost as good as an ordinary sheet of
paper by the time you had finished. By and by, while he was still at
work, the mill-woman brought him his supper on a plate, and raising
his head he saw that father and mother were sitting close together,
looking at each other, and saying nothing at all. He was very
disappointed that although father had come home they had not had any
jokes all the evening, and as they were all so dull he did not very
much mind being sent to bed when he had finished his supper. When he
said good-night to father, he noticed that his boots were very muddy,
as if he had walked a long way like a common postman. He made a joke
about this, but they all looked at him as if he had said something
wrong, so he hurried out of the room, glad to get away from these
people whose looks had no reasonable significance, and whose words
had no discoverable meaning. It had been a bad day, and he hoped
mother would let him go back to school the next morning. And yet though he took off his clothes and got into bed, the day was
not quite over. He had only dozed for a few minutes when he was
roused by a noise down below, and slipping out on to the staircase he
heard the mill-woman saying good-night in the passage. When she had
gone and the door had banged behind her, he listened still, and heard
his mother crying and his father talking on and on in a strange,
hoarse voice. Somehow these incomprehensible sounds made him feel
lonely, and he would have liked to have gone downstairs and sat on
his mother's lap and blinked drowsily in his father's face, as he had
done often enough before. But he was always shy in the presence of
strangers, and he felt that he did not know this woman who wept and
this man who did not laugh. His father was his play-friend, the
sharer of all his fun; his mother was a quiet woman who sat and
sewed, and sometimes told them not to be silly, which was the best
joke of all. It was not right for people to alter. But the thought of
his bedroom made him desolate, and at last he plucked up his courage,
and crept downstairs on bare feet. Father and mother had gone back
into the kitchen, and he peeped through the crack of the door to see
what they were doing. Mother was still crying, always crying, but he
had to change his position before he could see father. Then he turned
on his heels and ran upstairs trembling with fear and disgust. For
father, the man of all the jokes, the man of whom burglars were
afraid and compared with whom all other little boys' fathers were as
dirt, was crying like a little girl. He jumped into bed and pulled the bedclothes over his face to shut
out the ugliness of the world. III

When Jack woke up the next morning he found that the room was full of
sunshine, and that father was standing at the end of the bed. The
moment Jack opened his eyes, he began telling him something in a
serious voice, which was alone sufficient to prevent Jack from
understanding what he said. Besides, he used a lot of long words, and
Jack thought that it was silly to use long words before breakfast,
when nobody could be expected to remember what they meant. Father's
body neatly fitted the square of the window, and the sunbeams shone
in all round it and made it look splendid; and if Jack had not
already forgotten the unfortunate impression of the night before,
this would have enabled him to overcome it. Every now and then father
stopped to ask him if he understood, and he said he did, hoping to
find out what it was all about later on. It seemed, however, that
father was not going to the post-office any more, and this caused
Jack to picture a series of delightfully amusing days. When father
had finished talking he appeared to expect Jack to say something, but
Jack contented himself with trying to look interested, for he knew
that it was always very stupid of little boys not to understand
things they didn't understand. In reality he felt as if he had been
listening while his father argued aloud with himself, talking up and
down like an earthquake map. At breakfast they were still subdued, but afterwards, as the morning
wore on, father became livelier and helped Jack to build a hut in
the back garden. They built it of bean-sticks against the wall at the
end, and father broke up a packing-case to get planks for the roof. Only mother still had a sad face, and it made Jack angry with her,
that she should be such a spoil-fun. After dinner, while Jack was
playing in the hut, Mr. Simmons, of the police-station, and another
gentleman called to take father for a walk, and Jack went down to the
front to see them off. Jack knew Mr. Simmons very well; he had been
to tea with his little boy, but though he thought him a fine sort of
man he could not help feeling proud of his father when he saw them
side by side. Mr. Simmons looked as if he were ashamed of himself,
while father walked along with square shoulders and a high head as if
he had just done something splendid. The other gentleman looked like
nothing at all beside father. When they were out of sight Jack went into the house and found mother
crying in the kitchen.