“Why don’t you sleep a little, Sonie?” said Mrs. Henderson.

But I refused. I felt I must be vigilant now since I had abandoned him this afternoon. “I love Ivan,” I said.

“I know you do,” replied the woman. “I’m sure of it.”

“I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to him! Do you believe me, Mrs. Henderson?”

“Indeed I do, Sonie. You mustn’t feel bad about staying away this afternoon. He’ll be all right, you’ll see. Sonie, over there you’ll find some magazines. Don’t you want to look at them? I think we oughtn’t talk too much for fear of waking the little boy.”

Toward morning he was more peaceful and his forehead was cool. At sun-up we carried him home. My mother had been waiting up all night for me, and she was melancholy. She said nothing, only stared as we lowered Ivan to his cot.

He improved during the day although he developed a cough that troubled us and when in the afternoon he seemed to be choking with it, Mrs. Henderson sent me to the hospital for Dr. Galbraith. “Be clear with him, Sonie,” she said. “It’s sometimes hard for the doctor to follow what a person’s saying, you know.”

It was not because he was stupid but because he was an alcoholic that Dr. Galbraith could not follow. His quick speech, hampered by a hasty stammer, was deceptive. He spoke so rapidly he concealed the degeneration of his mind and appeared to be a man whose energy outdistanced his tongue, whose attention at any moment was subdivided many times, giving to each focus a degree of concentration varying with its importance. Breathless with the long run through the cold, I stood beside the desk in his sterile cell, while the doctor nervously twisted a fountain pen round and round between his plump fingers and interrupted me.

“Just a minute, you must try, you must try to control yourself.”

I sensed in his voice an agitation that surpassed my own. And while he kept me there with his trivial questions which he brought out with a great struggle (he even asked my age) he only made me wilder and himself more confused, so that, in the end, when he did come, he was not in the least prepared for what he found. I had identified Ivan as the child he had seen at the Hendersons’ and he thought he was being summoned to another epileptic fit. For a moment I was not sure that he would come at all. He sat staring at me, moving his lips. He had a repulsive face, flabby, blotched, and dissolute. The crescents of dark flesh under his eyes were distended and the eyes themselves were bloodshot, filmy, and of a color akin to auburn. His lips, tumid and wet, worked slowly over what his eyes saw as if, once the object were removed, he would still be able to recall it by running his tongue over his lips which had mouthed it and shaped its secret formula. He had had, I had heard, several attacks of jaundice and his skin was permanently stained to so dark a color that it resembled sunburn.