shook his
head. In the thin, blown light of the candelabra which he held high, the
worry and doubt of her deepened on his singularly-unlined face.

"And you might well catch your death in that draft, ma'am."

But she only continued to stare out between the pillars where the
lilac-hedge made a wall of deeper blackness across the night.

"What am I thinking of?" she whispered, and then: _"There!"_

And this time the old man heard it, a nearer, wind-blown hail.

"Mother! Oh, Mother!"

The boy came striding through the gap of the gate in the hedge.

"It's I, Mother! Chris! Aren't you surprised?"

She had no answer. As he came she turned and moved away from the door,
and the old man, peering from under the flat candle flames, saw her face
like wax. And he saw the boy, Christopher, in the doorway, his hands
flung out, his face transfigured.

"Mother! I'm here! Don't you understand?"

He touched her shoulder. She turned to him, as it were, lazily.

"Yes," she breathed. "I see."

He threw his arms about her, and felt her shaking from head to foot. But
he was shaking, too.

"I knew the way!" he cried. "I knew it, Mother, I knew it! I came down
from the Moor and there was the Willow Wood, and I knew the way home.
And when I came, Mother, it was like the trees bowing down their
branches in the dark. And when I came by the Beach, Mother, it was like
a roll of drums beating for me, and when I came to the Hill I saw the
Hedge standing against the sky, and I came, and here I am!"

She expressed no wonder, asked no question.

"Yes," was all she said, and it was as if she spoke of a tree coming to
its leaf, the wind to its height, the tide to its flood.

Had he been less rapt and triumphant he must have wondered more at that
icy lassitude, and at the cloak of ceremony she wrapped about her to
hide a terror. It was queer to hear the chill urbanity of her: "This is
Christopher, Nelson; Christopher, this is your father's servant,
Nelson." It was queerer still to see the fastidious decorum with which
she led him over this, the familiar house of his fathers.

He might have been a stranger, come with a guide-book in his hand. When
he stood on his heels in the big drawing-room, staring up with all his
eyes at the likenesses of those men he had known so well, it was strange
to hear her going on with all the patter of the gallery attendant, names
of painters, prices, dates. He stood before the portrait of Daniel Kain,
his fat