visible hand her
head began to bend forward. A thin, gray shade, as of inconceivably
fine ashes, settled upon her face, and her nostrils quivered. The
eyes, with the light fading from them, fixed themselves on Peter in
a last look.

"'--of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with
me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.'" Peter finished it for
her, his boyish voice a cry of agony.

A light, puffing breath, as of a candle blown out, exhaled from his
mother's lips. Her eyes closed, the hand in Peter's fell limp and
slack. The awful and mysterious smile of death fixed itself upon her
pale mouth.

So passed Maria Champneys from her tiny house in Riverton, in the
dawn of a winter morning, when the tide was turning and the world
was full of the sound of water running seaward.

CHAPTER III

AT GRIPS WITH LIFE

The best or the worst thing that can happen to a boy in this country
is to be poor in it for a while, to be picked up neck and crop and
flung upon his own resources; not always to remain poor, of course,
for one may be damned quite as effectually and everlastingly upon
the cross as off it; but to be poor long enough to acquire a sense
of proportion by coming to close grips with life; to learn what
things and people really are, the good and the bad of them together;
to have to weigh and measure cant and sentimentality and Christian
charity--which last is a fearsome thing--in the balance with truth
and common sense and human kindness. It is an experience that makes
or breaks.

Peter had always adored his mother; but it wasn't until now that he
realized how really wonderful she had been. How she had kept the
roof over his head, and his stomach somehow satisfied, and had sent
him to church and to school decently enough clad, Peter couldn't
imagine.

There was no possibility now of regular schooling. Nature hasn't
provided as providently for the human grub as for the insect one. A
human grub isn't born upon a food-plant that is a house as well,
nor is nature his tailor and his shoemaker. Peter wasn't blood kin
to anybody in Riverton, so there was no home open to him. He was
deeply sensible of the genuine kindness extended to him in his dark
hour, but he wouldn't, he couldn't, have gone permanently into any
of their homes had he been asked to do so, which of course he
wasn't. He clung to the little house on the big cove. His mother's
presence lingered there and hallowed the place.

T