d them they could ask no other credential for the name she bore and
the lavender she wore for the husband of whom she never spoke.

She spoke of him, indeed, but that was in privacy, and to her son. As
Christopher grew through boyhood, she watched him; in her enveloping
eagerness she forestalled the hour when he would have asked, and told
him about his father, Daniel Kain.

It gave them the added bond of secret-sharers. The tale grew as the boy
grew. Each night when Christopher crept into his mother's bed for the
quiet hour of her voice, it was as if he crept in to another world, the
wind-blown, sky-encompassed kingdom of the Kains, Daniel, his father,
and Maynard, _his_ father, another Maynard before _him_, and all the
Kains--and the Hill and the House, the Willow Wood, the Moor Under the
Cloud, the Beach where the gray seas pounded, the boundless Marsh, the
Lilac hedge standing against the stars.

He knew he would have to be a man of men to measure up to that heritage,
a man strong, grave, thoughtful, kind with the kindness that never
falters, brave with the courage of that dark and massive folk whose
blood ran in his veins. Coming as it did, a world of legend growing up
side by side with the matter-of-fact world of Concord Street, it never
occurred to him to question. He, the boy, was _not_ massive, strong,
or brave; he saw things in the dark that frightened him, his thin
shoulders were bound to droop, the hours of practise on his violin left
him with no blood in his legs and a queer pallor on his brow.

Nor was he always grave, thoughtful, kind. He did not often lose his
temper, the river of his young life ran too smooth and deep. But there
were times when he did. Brief passions swept him, blinded him, twisted
his fingers, left him sobbing, retching, and weak as death itself. He
never seemed to wonder at the discrepancy in things, however, any more
than he wondered at the look in his mother's eyes, as she hung over him,
waiting, in those moments of nausea after rage. She had not the look of
the gentlewoman then; she had more the look, a thousand times, of the
prisoner led through the last gray corridor in the dawn.

He saw her like that once when he had not been angry. It was on a day
when he came into the front hall unexpectedly as a stranger was going
out of the door. The stranger was dressed in rough, brown homespun; in
one hand he held a brown velour hat, in the other a thorn stick without
a ferrule. Nor was