or brave; he saw things in the dark that frightened him, his thin
shoulders were bound to droop, the hours of practise on his violin left
him with no blood in his legs and a queer pallor on his brow.

Nor was he always grave, thoughtful, kind. He did not often lose his
temper, the river of his young life ran too smooth and deep. But there
were times when he did. Brief passions swept him, blinded him, twisted
his fingers, left him sobbing, retching, and weak as death itself. He
never seemed to wonder at the discrepancy in things, however, any more
than he wondered at the look in his mother's eyes, as she hung over him,
waiting, in those moments of nausea after rage. She had not the look of
the gentlewoman then; she had more the look, a thousand times, of the
prisoner led through the last gray corridor in the dawn.

He saw her like that once when he had not been angry. It was on a day
when he came into the front hall unexpectedly as a stranger was going
out of the door. The stranger was dressed in rough, brown homespun; in
one hand he held a brown velour hat, in the other a thorn stick without
a ferrule. Nor was there anything more worthy of note in his face, an
average-long face with hollowed cheeks, sunken gray eyes, and a high
forehead, narrow, sallow, and moist.

No, it was not the stranger that troubled Christopher. It was his
mother's look at his own blundering entrance, and, when the man was out
of hearing, the tremulous haste of her explanation.

"He came about some papers, you know."

"You mean our _Morning Post?_" Christopher asked her.