“I knew the way!” he cried.  “I knew it, Mother, I knew it!  I came down from the Moor and there was the Willow Wood, and I knew the way home.  And when I came, Mother, it was like the trees bowing down their branches in the dark.  And when I came by the Beach, Mother, it was like a roll of drums beating for me, and when I came to the Hill I saw the Hedge standing against the sky, and I came, and here I am!”

She expressed no wonder, asked no question.

“Yes,” was all she said, and it was as if she spoke of a tree coming to its leaf, the wind to its height, the tide to its flood.

Had he been less rapt and triumphant he must have wondered more at that icy lassitude, and at the cloak of ceremony she wrapped about her to hide a terror.  It was queer to hear the chill urbanity of her:  “This is Christopher, Nelson; Christopher, this is your father’s servant, Nelson.”  It was queerer still to see the fastidious decorum with which she led him over this, the familiar house of his fathers.

He might have been a stranger, come with a guide-book in his hand.  When he stood on his heels in the big drawing-room, staring up with all his eyes at the likenesses of those men he had known so well, it was strange to hear her going on with all the patter of the gallery attendant, names of painters, prices, dates.  He stood before the portrait of Daniel Kain, his father, a dark-skinned, longish face with a slightly-protruding nether lip, hollow temples, and a round chin, deeply cleft.  As in all the others, the eyes, even in the dead pigment, seemed to shine with an odd, fixed luminosity of their own, and like the others from first to last of the line, it bore upon it the stamp of an imperishable youth.  And all the while he stood there, drinking it in, detail by detail, his mother spoke, not of the face, but of the frame, some obscure and unsuspected excellence in the gold-leaf on the frame.

More than once in that stately tour of halls and chambers he found himself protesting gaily, “I know, Mother!  I know, I know!”

But the contagion of his glory did not seem to touch her.  Nothing seemed to touch her.  Only once was the fragile, bright shell of her punctilio penetrated for a moment, and that was when Christopher, lagging, turned back to a door they were about to pass and threw it open with the happy laugh of a discoverer.  And then, even before she could have hushed him, the laughter on his lips died of itself.

A man lay on a bed in the room, his face as colourless and still as the pillow behind it.  His eyes were open, but they did not move from the three candles burning on the high bureau, and he seemed unconscious of any intrusion.

“I didn’t know!” Christopher whispered, shocked, and shamed.