"It is a young plant, and in the ordinary course would
not have come to flower before next year. But it is afraid that it
will never see next year. It is one of those poor little plants that
bloom prematurely because they are diseased."
Tommy was a little startled. He had often marvelled over his own
precocity, but never guessed that this might be the explanation why he
was in flower at twenty-two. "Is that a scientific fact?" he asked.
"It is a law of nature," the doctor replied gravely, and if anything
more was said on the subject our Tommy did not hear it. What did he
hear? He was a child again, in miserable lodgings, and it was sometime
in the long middle of the night, and what he heard from his bed was
his mother coughing away her life in hers. There was an angry knock,
knock, knock, from somewhere near, and he crept out of bed to tell his
mother that the people through the wall were complaining because she
would not die more quietly; but when he reached her bed it was not his
mother he saw lying there, but himself, aged twenty-four or
thereabouts. For Tommy had inherited his mother's cough; he had known
it every winter, but he remembered it as if for the first time now.
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