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.