The first thing that came into his groping mind was a bitter sense of abandonment.  The little core of candle-light hanging in the gloom left him out.  Its unstirring occupants, the woman, the ’cello, and the clay, seemed sufficient to themselves.  His mother had forgotten him.  Even “Ugo,” that had grown part and parcel of his madness, had forgotten him.

Bruised, sullen, moved by some deep-lying instinct of the clan, his eyes left them and sought the wall beyond, where there were those who would not forget him, come what might, blood of his blood and mind of his own queer mind.  And there among the shadowed faces he searched for one in vain.  As if that candle-lit tableau, somehow holy and somehow abominable, were not for the eyes of one of them, the face of Daniel, the wedded husband, had been turned to the wall.

Here was something definite, something Christopher could take hold of, and something that he would not have.

His mother seemed not to have known he was near till he flung the door back and came stalking into the light with the rusty bread-knife in his hand.  One would not have imagined there were blood enough left in her wasted heart, but her face went crimson when she lifted it and saw him.

It brought him up short—­the blush, where he had looked for fright.  It shocked him, and, shocking him more than by a thousand laboured words of explanation, it opened a window in his disordered brain.  He stood gawking with the effort of thought, hardly conscious of his mother’s cry: 

“Christopher, I never meant you to know!”

He kept on staring at the ashen face between the pillows, long (as his own was long), sensitive, worn; and at the ’cello keeping incorruptible vigil over its dead.  And then slowly his eyes went down to his own left hand, to which that same old wine-brown creature had come home from the first with a curious sense of fitness and authority and right.

“Who is this man?”

“Don’t look at me so!  Don’t, Chris!”

But he did look at her.  Preoccupied as he was, he was appalled at sight of the damage the half-dozen of days had done.  She had been so much the lady, so perfectly the gentlewoman.  To no one had the outward gesture and symbol of purity been more precious.  No whisper had ever breathed against her.  If there had been secrets behind her, they had been dead; if a skeleton, the closet had been closed.  And now, looking down on her, he was not only appalled, he was a little sickened, as one might be to find squalor and decay creeping into a familiar and once immaculate room.

“Who is this man?” he repeated.