.... Besides it was becoming almost a habit with
him. He'd been drifting there so frequently of late!... In fact, he'd
scarcely been anywhere at all, recently, except--except where he
certainly was not going that evening. And that settled it!... So he
might as well go to the opera.

* * * * *

His mother, in scarf and evening wrap, passing the library door on her
way down, paused in the hall and looked intently at her only son.

Recently she had been observing him rather closely and with a vague
uneasiness born of that inexplicable sixth sense inherent in mothers.

Perhaps what her son had faced in France accounted for the change in
him;--for it was being said that no man could come back from such
scenes unchanged;--none could ever again be the same. And it was being
said, too, that old beliefs and ideals had altered; that everything
familiar was ending;--and that the former things had already passed
away under the glimmering dawn of a new heaven and a new earth.

Perhaps all this was so--though she doubted it. Perhaps this son she
had borne in agony might become to her somebody less familiar than the
baby she had nursed at her own breast.

But so far, to her, he continued to remain the same familiar baby she
had always known--the same and utterly vital part of her soul and
body. No sudden fulfilment of an apocalypse had yet wrought any occult
metamorphosis in this boy of hers.

And if he now seemed changed it was from that simple and familiar
cause instinctively understood by mothers,--trouble!--the most ancient
plague of all and the only malady which none escapes.

She was a rather startlingly pretty woman, with the delicate features
and colour and the snow-white hair of an 18th century belle. She
stood, now, drawing on her gloves and watching her son out of
dark-fringed deep blue eyes, until he glanced around uneasily. Then he
rose at once, looking at her with fire-dazzled eyes.

"Don't rise, dear," she said; "the car is here and your father is
fussing and fuming in the drawing-room, and I've got to run.... Have
you any plans for the evening?"

"None, mother."

"You're dining at home?"

"Yes."

"Why don't you go to the opera to-night? It's the Sharrows' night."

He came toward her irresolutely. "Perhaps I shall," he said. And
instantly she knew he did not intend to go.

"I had tea at the Sharrows'," she said, carelessly, still buttoning
her gloves. "Elorn t