red 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 b