her little hoard of Christmas savings with a request that he buy this for Frank and that for Mary and a dozen other gifts and remembrances for his cousins and his aunt. Her letters to him had been full of news and comment—the letters of a woman who looked on life from the windows of her sick-room with a spectator's interest and sympathy. He had felt her watching him in all his absence. He had seen her sitting over her needlework, thinking of him. And he had come to her, now, with a heart full of affection.
But when he sat down opposite her chair, still smiling and blushing awkwardly from the caress of welcome, he found himself facing the loving scrutiny of her gaze; and he looked away quickly, conscious of the change in himself, his beliefs, his outlook on life, his hidden thoughts and the growth of experiences in which she had had no part. It seemed to him that she would penetrate the secret behind his eyes if she saw into them clearly. And this very attempt of concealment betrayed him to her. With a mother's quick suspicion, she began to seek him out, with those apparently trivial questions which are like the tappings of a tiny hammer on the suspected panels of a wainscoating.
They found him by the silences with which he tried to cover his boy's secrets. It took her days to do it; but in the long talks which they had together in her room—sitting with the winter sunlight on the lace curtains and her needle busy in the embroidery with which she occupied her wasted hands—she probed
