He sat there so lost and rapt that he heard nothing of his mother’s footsteps hurrying in the hall; knew nothing till he saw her face in the open doorway.  She had forgotten herself this time; that fragile defense of gentility was down.  For a moment they stared at each other across a gulf of silence, and little by little the boy’s cheeks grew as white as hers, his hands as cold, his lungs as empty of breath.

“What is it, Mother?”

“Oh, Christopher, Christopher—­Go to bed, dear.”

He did not know why, but of a sudden he felt ashamed and a little frightened, and, blowing out the candle, he crept under the covers.

The afternoon was bright with a rare sun and the world was quiet.  Christopher lay full-spread on the turf, listening idly to the “clip-clip” of Nelson’s shears as the old man trimmed the hedge.

“And was my father very strong?” he asked with a drowsy pride.

“No, not so very.”  Nelson stopped clipping and was immediately lost in the past.

“Only when he was that way five strong men couldn’t turn him.  I’ll say that.  No, if they had to get him with a shotgun that day, ’twas nobody’s fault nor sin.  If Guy Bullard seen Daniel there on the sand with an ax in his hand and foam-like on his lips, and the little ones cornered where he caught them between cliff and water—­Guy’s own baby amongst them—­and knowing the sickness of the Kains as he and everybody else did—­why, I’m free and willing to say ’twas his bounden duty to hold a true aim and pull a steady trigger on Daniel, man of his though I was, and man of his poor father before him—­

“No, I can’t make it right to lay blame on any man for it, no more than I can on them, his brother officers, that broke Maynard’s neck with their tent-pegs the night after Gettysburg.  No, no—­”

It was evidently a time-worn theme, an argument, an apologia, accepted after years of bitterness and self-searching.  He went on with the remote serenity of age, that has escaped the toils of passion, pursuing the old, worn path of his mind, his eyes buried in vacancy.

“No, ’twas a mercy to the both of them, father and son, and a man must see it so.  ’Twould be better of course if they could have gone easier, same as the old Maynard went, thinking himself the Lord our God to walk on water and calm the West Indy gale.  That’s better, better for all hands round.  But if it had to come so, in violence and fear, then nobody need feel the sin of it on his soul—­nobody excepting the old man Bickers, him that told Daniel.  For ’twas from that day he began to take it on.

“I saw it myself.  There was Daniel come home from other parts where his mother had kept him, out of gossip’s way, bright as you please and knowing nothing wrong with the blood of the Kains.  And so I say the sin lays on the loose-wagging tongue of Bickers, for from the day he let it out to Daniel, Daniel changed.  ’Twas like he’d heard his doom, and went to it.  Bickers is dead a long time now, but may the Lord God lay eternal damnation on his soul!”