r if he
hadn't made a mistake in the nature of his own destination. Suppose,
after all, he should find himself castaway in some oasis of determined
sprightliness with Wally Whitaker in whose pocket pretenses of tips and
margins he began to discern a poorer sort of substitute for the House.
He was as much bored by the permanently young shoe-salesman after this
discovery as before it, but obliged to set a watch on himself lest in a
moment of finding himself too much in the same case, he should make the
mistake of inviting Wally to Bloombury for his vacation.

He was relieved, when at last he had got away without it, to be saved
from such a misadventure, for he found his mother not standing the heat
well, and Ellen anxious. He had never definitely shaped to himself the
idea that there could anything happen to his mother; she was as much a
part of his life as the aging apple trees and the hills that climbed,
with low, gnarled pines to the sky's edge beyond the marshes, a point
from which to take distance and direction. He began to note now the
graying hair, the shrunken breast and the worn hands, so blue veined for
all their brownness, and he could not sleep of nights because of the
sweat that was on his soul, for fear of what might come to her. He would
lie in the little room under the roof and hear the elms moving like the
riffle of silence into sound, thinking of his mother until at last he
would be obliged to rise and move softly about the place, as if by the
mere assertion of himself he could make her safer in it. He wished
nothing so much as not to disturb her, but she must have been lying
awake often herself, for the second or third time this happened, she
called to him. He came, half dressed as he was and drew the covers up
close about her shoulders, and was exceedingly gay and tender with her.

"There's nothing troubling you, son?"

"Nothing--except to be sure there's nothing troubling _you_."

She gave a little, low laugh like a girl.

"That's so like your father. I remember he would get up in the night
when you were little, and go prowling about ... he used to say he was
afraid the roof tree would fall in and kill you. And yet here you
are...." She reached out to give him a little pat, as if somehow to
reassure him. The low dropping moon made a square block of light on
the uncarpeted floor; outside, the orchard waited for the dawn, and
the fields brimmed life up to their very doors.

"You're like him in oth