Even then there was no heat; the curse had grown a formula.  Having come to the end, the old man’s eyes tumbled down painlessly out of the void and discovered the shears in his hand.

“Dear me, that’s so,” he said to himself.  One thought was enough at a time.  He fell to work again.  The steady “clip-clip-clip” moved off slowly along the hedge.  Not once did he remember; not once as the indefatigable worker shuffled himself out of sight around the house did he look back with any stirring of recollection at the boyish figure lying there as still as a shadow cast in the deep grass.

A faintly lop-sided moon swam in the zenith.  For three days now that rare clarity had hung in the sky, and for three nights the moon had grown.  Its benign, poisonous illumination flowed down steeply through the windows of the dark chamber where Christopher huddled on the bed’s edge, three pale, chill islands spread on the polished floor.

Once again the boy brought the bow home across the shivering strings, and, as if ears could be thirsty as a drunkard’s throat, he drank his fill of the ’cello’s deep, full-membered chord.  The air was heavy with the resonance of marching feet, ghostly feet marching and marching down upon him in slow, inexorable crescendo as the tides ebbed later among the sedges on the marsh and the moon grew big.  And above the pulse of the march he seemed to hear another cadence, a thin laughter.

He laughed too, giving himself up to that spectral contagion.  He saw the fat, iridescent bubble with the Hill in it, the House of dreams, the Beach and the Moor and Willow Wood of fancy, and all the grave, strong, gentle line of Kains to whom he had been made bow down in worship.  He saw himself taken in, soul and body, by a thin-plated fraud, a cheap trick of mother’s words, as before him, his father had been.  And the faint exhalations from the moon-patches on the floor showed his face contorted with a still, set grimace of mirth.

Anger came over him in a white veil, twitching his lips and his toes and bending his fingers in knots.  Through the veil a sound crept, a sound he knew well by this time, secret footfalls in the hall, faltering, retreating, loitering returning to lag near the door.

How he hated her!  It is curious that not once did his passion turn against his blighted fathers; it was against the woman who had borne him, the babe, and lied to him, the boy—­against her, and against that man, that interloper, dying in a room below.

The thought that had been willing to creep out of sight into the back-country of his mind on that first night came out now like a red, devouring cloud.  Who was that man?

What was he dying of—­or supposed to be dying of?  What had he been doing that morning in Concord Street?  What was he doing here, in the house of the men who had never grown old and of the boy who would never grow old?  Why had his mother come down here, where he was, so queerly, so secretly, so frightened?