He saw her like that once when he had not been angry.  It was on a day when he came into the front hall unexpectedly as a stranger was going out of the door.  The stranger was dressed in rough, brown homespun; in one hand he held a brown velour hat, in the other a thorn stick without a ferrule.  Nor was there anything more worthy of note in his face, an average-long face with hollowed cheeks, sunken gray eyes, and a high forehead, narrow, sallow, and moist.

No, it was not the stranger that troubled Christopher.  It was his mother’s look at his own blundering entrance, and, when the man was out of hearing, the tremulous haste of her explanation.

“He came about some papers, you know.”

“You mean our Morning Post?” Christopher asked her.

She let her breath out all at once and colour flooded her face.

“Yes,” she told him.  “Yes, yes.”

Neither of them said anything more about it.

It was that same day, toward evening, that Christopher broke one of his long silences, reverting to a subject always near to them both.

“Mother, you’ve never told me where it is—­on the map, I mean.”

She was looking the other way.  She did not turn around.

“I—­Chris—­I—­I haven’t a map in the house.”

He did not press the matter.  He went out into the back yard presently, under the grape-trellis, and there he stood still for a long time, staring at nothing particular.

He was growing up.

He went away to boarding-school not long after this, taking with him the picture of his adored mother, the treasured epic of his dark, strong fathers, his narrow shoulders, his rare, blind bursts of passion, his newborn wonder, and his violin.  At school they thought him a queer one.

The destinies of men are unaccountable things.  Five children in the village of Deer Bay came down with diphtheria.  That was why the academy shut up for a week, and that was what started Christopher on his way home for an unexpected holiday.  And then it was only by one chance in a thousand that he should glimpse his mother’s face in the down-train halted at the junction where he himself was changing.

She did not see till he came striding along the aisle of her coach, his arms full of his things, face flushed, eyes brimming with the surprise and pleasure of seeing her; his lips trembling questions.

“Why, Mother, what in earth?  Where are you going?  I’m to have a week at least, Mother; and here you’re going away, and you didn’t tell me, and what is it, and everything?”

His eager voice trailed off.  The colour drained out of his face and there was a shadow in his eyes.  He drew back from her the least way.

“What is it, Mother? Mother!”

Somewhere on the platform outside the conductor’s droning “—­board” ran along the coaches.  Agnes Kain opened her white lips.