Once again the boy brought the bow home across the shivering strings,
and, as if ears could be thirsty as a drunkard's throat, he drank his
fill of the 'cello's deep, full-membered chord. The air was heavy with
the resonance of marching feet, ghostly feet marching and marching down
upon him in slow, inexorable crescendo as the tides ebbed later among
the sedges on the marsh and the moon grew big. And above the pulse of
the march he seemed to hear another cadence, a thin laughter.

He laughed too, giving himself up to that spectral contagion. He saw the
fat, iridescent bubble with the Hill in it, the House of dreams, the
Beach and the Moor and Willow Wood of fancy, and all the grave, strong,
gentle line of Kains to whom he had been made bow down in worship. He
saw himself taken in, soul and body, by a thin-plated fraud, a cheap
trick of mother's words, as before him, his father had been. And the
faint exhalations from the moon-patches on the floor showed his face
contorted with a still, set grimace of mirth.

Anger came over him in a white veil, twitching his lips and his toes and
bending his fingers in knots. Through the veil a sound crept, a sound he
knew well by this time, secret footfalls in the hall, faltering,
retreating, loitering returning to lag near the door.

How he hated her! It is curious that not once did his passion turn
against his blighted fathers; it was against the woman who had borne
him, the babe, and lied to him, the boy--against her, and against that
man, that interloper, dying in a room below.

The thought that had been willing to creep out of sight into the
back-country of his mind on that first night came out now like a red,
devouring cloud. Who was that man?