She had not the look of
the gentlewoman then; she had more the look, a thousand times, of the
prisoner led through the last gray corridor in the dawn.
He saw her like that once when he had not been angry. It was on a day
when he came into the front hall unexpectedly as a stranger was going
out of the door. The stranger was dressed in rough, brown homespun; in
one hand he held a brown velour hat, in the other a thorn stick without
a ferrule. Nor was there anything more worthy of note in his face, an
average-long face with hollowed cheeks, sunken gray eyes, and a high
forehead, narrow, sallow, and moist.
No, it was not the stranger that troubled Christopher. It was his
mother's look at his own blundering entrance, and, when the man was out
of hearing, the tremulous haste of her explanation.
"He came about some papers, you know."
"You mean our _Morning Post?_" Christopher asked her.
She let her breath out all at once and colour flooded her face.
"Yes," she told him. "Yes, yes."
Neither of them said anything more about it.
It was that same day, toward evening, that Christopher broke one of his
long silences, reverting to a subject always near to them both.
"Mother, you've never told me where it is--on the _map_, I mean."
She was looking the other way. She did not turn around.
"I--Chris--I--I haven't a map in the house."
He did not press the matter. He went out into the back yard presently,
under the grape-trellis, and there he stood still for a long time,
staring at nothing particular.
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