and for a winter in Budapest. The health she too sedulously watched she
was fast destroying, and her son was at the time of her death a thin,
pallid, undersized boy, who disliked even the mild sports of French lads,
and had been flattered and considered until he had acquired the
conviction that he was an important member of an important family. His
other mother--nature--had given him, happily, better traits. He was an
observer, a born lover of books, intelligent, truthful, and trained
in the gentle, somewhat formal, manners of an older person. Now for the
first time in his guarded life he was alone on a railway journey in
charge of the conductor. A more unhappy, frightened little fellow could
hardly have been found.

The train paused at many stations; men and women got on or got out of the
cars, very common-looking people, surely, he concluded. The day ran by to
afternoon. The train had stopped at a station for lunch, but John,
although hungry, was afraid of being left and kept the seat which he
presumed to be his own property until a stout man took half of it. A
little later, a lean old woman said, "Move up, sonny," and sat down.
When she asked his name and where he lived, he replied in the coldly
civil manner with which he had heard his mother repress the good-natured
advances of her wandering countrymen. When again the seat was free, he
fell to thinking of the unknown home, Grey Pine, which he had heard his
mother talk of to English friends as "our ancestral home," and of the
great forests, the mines and the iron-works. Her son would, of course,
inherit it, as Captain Penhallow had no child. "Really a great estate,
my dear," his mother had said. It loomed large in his young imagination.
Who would meet him? Probably a carriage with the liveried driver and the
groom immaculate in white-topped boots, a fur cover on his arm. It would,
of course, be Captain Penhallow who would make him welcome. Then the
cold, which is hostile to imagination, made him shiver as he drew his