He went off a little way to the side of the road and sat down
on a flat stone.
The world had become of a sudden infinitely simple, as simple as the
inside of a cup. The land broke down under him, a long, naked slope
fringed at the foot of a ribbon of woods. Through the upper branches he
saw the shingles and chimneys of a pale grey village clinging to a white
beach, a beach which ran up to the left in a bolder flight of cliffs,
showing on their crest a cluster of roofs and dull-green gable-ends
against the sea that lifted vast, unbroken, to the rim of the cup.
Christopher was fifteen, and queer even for that queer age. He had a
streak of the girl in him at his adolescence, and, as he sat there in a
huddle, the wind coming out of this huge new gulf of life seemed to pass
through him, bone and tissue, and tears rolled down his face.
The carriage bearing his strange mother was gone, from sight and from
mind. His eyes came down from the lilac-crowned hill to the beach, where
it showed in white patches through the wood, and he saw that the wood
was of willows. And he remembered the plain behind him, the wide, brown
moor under the could. He got up on his wobbly legs. There were stones
all about him on the whispering wire-grass, and like them the one he had
been sitting on bore a blurred inscription. He read it aloud, for some
reason, his voice borne away faintly on the river of air:
Here Lie The Earthly Remains Of
MAYNARD KAIN, SECOND
Born 1835--Died 1862 For the Preservation of the Union
His gaze went on to another of those worn stones.
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