watched she was fast destroying, and her son was at the time of her death a thin, pallid, undersized boy, who disliked even the mild sports of French lads, and had been flattered and considered until he had acquired the conviction that he was an important member of an important family.  His other mother—­nature—­had given him, happily, better traits.  He was an observer, a born lover of books, intelligent, truthful, and trained in the gentle, somewhat formal, manners of an older person.  Now for the first time in his guarded life he was alone on a railway journey in charge of the conductor.  A more unhappy, frightened little fellow could hardly have been found.

The train paused at many stations; men and women got on or got out of the cars, very common-looking people, surely, he concluded.  The day ran by to afternoon.  The train had stopped at a station for lunch, but John, although hungry, was afraid of being left and kept the seat which he presumed to be his own property until a stout man took half of it.  A little later, a lean old woman said, “Move up, sonny,” and sat down.  When she asked his name and where he lived, he replied in the coldly civil manner with which he had heard his mother repress the good-natured advances of her wandering countrymen.  When again the seat was free, he fell to thinking of the unknown home, Grey Pine, which he had heard his mother talk of to English friends as “our ancestral home,” and of the great forests, the mines and the iron-works.  Her son would, of course, inherit it, as Captain Penhallow had no child.  “Really a great estate, my dear,” his mother had said.  It loomed large in his young imagination.  Who would meet him?  Probably a carriage with the liveried driver and the groom immaculate in white-topped boots, a fur cover on his arm.  It would, of course, be Captain Penhallow who would make him welcome.  Then the cold, which is hostile to imagination, made him shiver as he drew his thin cloak about him and watched the snow squadrons wind-driven and the big flakes blurring his view as they melted on the panes.  By and by, two giggling young women near by made comments on his looks and dress.  Fragments of their talk he overheard.  It was not quite pleasant.  “Law! ain’t he got curly hair, and ain’t he just like a girl doll,” and so on in the lawless freedom of democratic feminine speech.  The flat Morocco cap and large visor of the French schoolboy and the dark blue cloak with the silver clasp were subjects of comment.  One of them offered peanuts or sugar-plums, which he declined with “Much obliged, but I never take them.”  Now and then he consulted his watch or felt in his pocket to be certain that his baggage-check was secure, or looked to see if the little bag of toilet articles at his feet was safe.  The kindly attentions of those who noticed his evident discomfort were neither mannerless nor, as he thought, impertinent.  A woman said to him that he seemed cold, wouldn’t he put around him a shawl she laid on his knees.