old man was a sportsman. It was a great pity that he should have to make
him unhappy over this business. But there it was--you couldn't alter
things.

It was this fatalistic philosophy that finally ruled everything with him.
"What must be must." If things went wrong he had his courage, and he was
helped too by his contempt for the world....

He knew his father, but he was aware now that he knew nothing at all about
his mother.

"What's _she_ thinking about?" he asked himself.

One afternoon he was about to go to Seatown when, in the passage outside
his bedroom, he met his mother. They both stopped as though they had
something to say to one another. He did not look at all like her son, so
fair, tall and aloof, as though even in his own house he must be on his
guard, prepared to challenge any one who threatened his private plans.

"She's like a little mouse," he thought to himself, as though he were
seeing her for the first time, "preparing to run off into the wainscot" He
was conscious, too, of her quiet clothes and shy preoccupied timidity--all
of it he seemed to see for the first time, a disguise for some purpose as
secret, perhaps, as his own.

"Oh, Falk," she said, and stopped, and then went on with the question that
she so often asked him:

"Is there anything you want?"