“Get off before it’s too late, Christopher.  I haven’t time to explain now.  Go home, and Mary will see you have everything.  I’ll be back in a day or so.  Kiss me, and go quickly.  Quickly!”

He did not kiss her.  He would not have kissed her for worlds.  He was to bewildered, dazed, lost, too inexpressibly hurt.  On the platform outside, had she turned ever so little to look, she might have seen his face again for an instant as the wheels ground on the rails.  Colour was coming back to it again, a murky colour like the shadow of a red cloud.

They must have wondered, in the coach with her, at the change in the calm, unobtrusive, well-gowned gentlewoman, their fellow-passenger.  Those that were left after another two hours saw her get down at a barren station where an old man waited in a carriage.  The halt was brief, and none of them caught sight of the boyish figure that slipped down from the rearmost coach to take shelter for himself and his dark, tempest-ridden face behind the shed at the end of the platform—­

Christopher walked out across a broad, high, cloudy plain, following a red road, led by the dust-feather hanging over the distant carriage.

He walked for miles, creeping ant-like between the immensities of the brown plain and the tumbled sky.  Had he been less implacable, less intent, he might have noticed many things, the changing conformation of the clouds, the far flight of a gull, the new perfume and texture of the wind that flowed over his hot temples.  But as it was, the sea took him by surprise.  Coming over a little rise, his eyes focused for another long, dun fold of the plain, it seemed for an instant as if he had lost his balance over a void; for a wink he felt the passing of a strange sickness.  He went off a little way to the side of the road and sat down on a flat stone.

The world had become of a sudden infinitely simple, as simple as the inside of a cup.  The land broke down under him, a long, naked slope fringed at the foot of a ribbon of woods.  Through the upper branches he saw the shingles and chimneys of a pale grey village clinging to a white beach, a beach which ran up to the left in a bolder flight of cliffs, showing on their crest a cluster of roofs and dull-green gable-ends against the sea that lifted vast, unbroken, to the rim of the cup.

Christopher was fifteen, and queer even for that queer age.  He had a streak of the girl in him at his adolescence, and, as he sat there in a huddle, the wind coming out of this huge new gulf of life seemed to pass through him, bone and tissue, and tears rolled down his face.

The carriage bearing his strange mother was gone, from sight and from mind.  His eyes came down from the lilac-crowned hill to the beach, where it showed in white patches through the wood, and he saw that the wood was of willows.  And he remembered the plain behind him, the wide, brown moor under the could.  He got up on his wobbly legs.  There were stones all about him on the whispering wire-grass, and like them the one he had been sitting on bore a blurred inscription.  He read it aloud, for some reason, his voice borne away faintly on the river of air: