Here was something definite, something Christopher could take hold of,
and something that he would not have.

His mother seemed not to have known he was near till he flung the door
back and came stalking into the light with the rusty bread-knife in his
hand. One would not have imagined there were blood enough left in her
wasted heart, but her face went crimson when she lifted it and saw him.

It brought him up short--the blush, where he had looked for fright. It
shocked him, and, shocking him more than by a thousand laboured words of
explanation, it opened a window in his disordered brain. He stood
gawking with the effort of thought, hardly conscious of his mother's
cry:

"Christopher, I never meant you to know!"

He kept on staring at the ashen face between the pillows, long (as his
own was long), sensitive, worn; and at the 'cello keeping incorruptible
vigil over its dead. And then slowly his eyes went down to his own left
hand, to which that same old wine-brown creature had come home from the
first with a curious sense of fitness and authority and right.

"Who is this man?"

"Don't look at me so! Don't, Chris!"

But he did look at her. Preoccupied as he was, he was appalled at sight
of the damage the half-dozen of days had done. She had been so much the
lady, so perfectly the gentlewoman. To no one had the outward gesture