doorway that morning months ago, with a
brown hat in one hand and a thorn stick in the other.

Even a thing like that may be half put aside, though--for a while. And
by the time Christopher went to his room for the night the thought of
the interloper had retired into the back of his mind, and they were all
Kains there on the Hill, inheritors of romance. He found himself bowing
to his mother with a courtliness he had never known, and an "I wish you
a good night," sounding a century old on his lips. He saw the remote,
patrician figure bow as gravely in return, a petal of colour as hard as
paint on the whiteness of either cheek. He did not see her afterward,
though, when the merciful door was closed.

Before he slept he explored the chamber, touching old objects with
reverent finger-tips. He came on a leather case like an absurdly
overgrown beetle, hidden in a corner, and a violoncello was in it. He
had seen such things before, but he had never touched one, and when he
lifted it from the case he had a moment of feeling very odd at the pit
of his stomach. Sitting in his underthings on the edge of the bed, he
held the wine-coloured creature in the crook of his arm for a long time,
the look in his round eyes, half eagerness, half pain, of one pursuing
the shadow of some ghostly and elusive memory.

He touched the C-string by and by with an adventuring thumb. I have
heard "Ugo" sing, myself, and I know what Christopher meant when he said
that the sound did not come out of the instrument, but that it came
_in_ to it, sweeping home from all the walls and corners of the
chamber, a slow, rich, concentric wind of tone. He felt it about him,
murmurous, pulsating, like the sound of surf borne from some far-off
coast.

And then it was like drums, still farther off. And then it was the feet
of marching men, massive, dark, grave men with luminous eyes, and the
stamp on their faces of an imperishable youth.

He sat there so lost and rapt that he heard nothing of his mother's
footsteps hurrying in the hall; knew nothing till he saw her face in the
open doorway. She had forgotten herself this time; that fragile defense
of gentility was down. For a moment they stared at each other across a
gulf of silence, and little by little the boy's cheeks grew as white as
hers, his hands as cold, his lungs as empty of breath.

"What is it, Mother?"

"Oh, Christopher, Christopher--Go to bed, dear."

He did not know why, but of a sudden he felt