were brothers there was no doubt in either of their minds, and together
they travelled home.

And now the old father and mother had got their son back, and they told
him the story of the thirty years during which they had lamented his
loss, and of how at last they had succeeded in recovering him:--what
had he to tell them in return? It was a disappointing story. For, to
begin with, he had no recollection of his child life at home--no
faintest memory of mother or father or of the day when the sudden
violent change came and he was forcibly taken away. His earliest
recollection was of being taken about by someone--a man who owned him,
who was always at the cattle-estates where he worked, and how this man
treated him kindly until he was big enough to be set to work
shepherding sheep and driving cattle, and doing anything a boy could do
at any place they lived in, and that his owner and master then began to
be exacting and tyrannical, and treated him so badly that he eventually
ran away and never saw the man again. And from that time onward he
lived much the same kind of life as when with his master, constantly
going about from place to place, from province to province, and finally
he had for some unexplained reason been taken into the army.

That was all--the story of his thirty years of wild horseback life told
in a few dry sentences! Could more have been expected! The mother had
expected more and would not cease to expect it. He was her lost one
found again, the child of her body who in his long absence had gotten a
second nature; but it was nothing but a colour, a garment, which would
wear thinner and thinner, and by-and-by reveal the old deeper
ineradicable nature beneath. So she imagined, and would take him out to
walk to be with him, to have him all to herself, to caress him, and
they would walk, she with an arm round his neck or waist; and when she