Christopher leaned over her and held out his arms.

"It is your bedtime, mother--shall I carry you across?" he asked;
and as the old lady nodded, he lifted her as if she were a child
and held her closely against his breast, feeling his tenderness
revive at the clasp of her fragile hands. When he placed her upon
her bed, he kissed her good-night and went up the narrow
staircase, stooping carefully to avoid the whitewashed ceiling
above.

Once in his room, he threw off his coat and sat down upon the
side of his narrow bed, glancing contemptuously at his bare brown
arms, which showed through the openings in his blue shirt
sleeves. He was still smarting from the memory of the sudden
selfconsciousness he had felt downstairs, and a pricking
sensitiveness took possession of him, piercing like needles
through the boorish indifference he had worn. All at once he
realised that he was ashamed of himself--ashamed of his
ignorance, his awkwardness, his brutality--and with the shame
there awoke the slow anger of a sullen beast. Fate had driven him
like a whipped hound to the kennel, but he could still snarl back
his defiance from the shadow of his obscurity. The strong
masculine beauty of his face--the beauty, as Cynthia had said, of
the young David--confronted him in the little greenish mirror
above the bureau, and in the dull misery of the eyes he read
those higher possibilities, which even to-day he could not regard
without a positive pang. What he might have been seemed forever
struggling in his look with what he was, like the Scriptural
wrestle between the angel of the Lord and the brute. The soul,