e lips.

"Get off before it's too late, Christopher. I haven't time to explain
now. Go home, and Mary will see you have everything. I'll be back in a
day or so. Kiss me, and go quickly. Quickly!"

He did not kiss her. He would not have kissed her for worlds. He was to
bewildered, dazed, lost, too inexpressibly hurt. On the platform
outside, had she turned ever so little to look, she might have seen his
face again for an instant as the wheels ground on the rails. Colour was
coming back to it again, a murky colour like the shadow of a red cloud.

They must have wondered, in the coach with her, at the change in the
calm, unobtrusive, well-gowned gentlewoman, their fellow-passenger.
Those that were left after another two hours saw her get down at a
barren station where an old man waited in a carriage. The halt was
brief, and none of them caught sight of the boyish figure that slipped
down from the rearmost coach to take shelter for himself and his dark,
tempest-ridden face behind the shed at the end of the platform--

Christopher walked out across a broad, high, cloudy plain, following a
red road, led by the dust-feather hanging over the distant carriage.

He walked for miles, creeping ant-like between the immensities of the
brown plain and the tumbled sky. Had he been less implacable, less
intent, he might have noticed many things, the changing conformation of
the clouds, the far flight of a gull, the new perfume and texture of the
wind that flowed over his hot temples. But as it was, the sea took him
by surprise. Coming over a little rise, his eyes focused for another
long, dun fold of the plain, it seemed for an instant as if he had lost
his balance over a void; for a wink he felt the passing of a strange
sickness. He went off a little way to the side of the road and sat down
on a flat stone.

The world had become of a sudden infinitely simple, as simple as the
inside of a cup. The land broke down under him, a long, naked slope
fringed at the foot of a ribbon of woods. Through the upper branches he
saw the shingles and chimneys of a pale grey village clinging to a white
beach, a beach which ran up to the left in a bolder flight of cliffs,
showing on their crest a cluster of roofs and dull-green gable-ends
against the sea that lifted vast, unbroken, to the rim of the cup.

Christopher was fifteen, and queer even for that queer age. He had a
streak of the girl in him at his adolescence, and, as he sat there in a
hud