word went out. Quiet, reserved, gracious, continent, bearing in face and
form the fragile beauty of a rose-petal come to its fading on a windless
ledge, she moved down the years with the stedfast sweetness of the
gentlewoman--gentle, and a woman.

They knew little about her in the city, where she had come with her son.
They did not need to. Looking into her eyes, into the transparent soul
behind them they could ask no other credential for the name she bore and
the lavender she wore for the husband of whom she never spoke.

She spoke of him, indeed, but that was in privacy, and to her son. As
Christopher grew through boyhood, she watched him; in her enveloping
eagerness she forestalled the hour when he would have asked, and told
him about his father, Daniel Kain.

It gave them the added bond of secret-sharers. The tale grew as the boy
grew. Each night when Christopher crept into his mother's bed for the
quiet hour of her voice, it was as if he crept in to another world, the
wind-blown, sky-encompassed kingdom of the Kains, Daniel, his father,
and Maynard, _his_ father, another Maynard before _him_, and all the
Kains--and the Hill and the House, the Willow Wood, the Moor Under the
Cloud, the Beach where the gray seas pounded, the boundless Marsh, the
Lilac hedge standing against the stars.

He knew he would have to be a man of men to measure up to that heritage,
a man strong, grave, thoughtful, kind with the kindness that never
falters, brave with the courage of that dark and massive folk whose
blood ran in his veins. Coming as it did, a world of legend growing up
side by side with the matter-of-fact world of Concord Street, it never
occurred to him to question. He, the boy, was _not_ massive, strong,