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.

"He grew up with me." She half raised herself on her knees in the
eagerness of her appeal. "We were boy and girl together at home in
Maryland. We were meant for each other, Chris. We were always to
marry--always, Chris. And when I went away, and when I married
your--when I married Daniel Kain, _he_ hunted and he searched and he
found me here. He was with me, he stood by me through that awful
year--and--that was how it happened. I tell you, Christopher, darling,
we were meant for each other, John Sanderson and I