"I wouldn't distress myself, one way or t' other, if it don't come
natural," the packer spoke, out of his corner in the darkness. "Wait till
you can feel to say it. The word ain't nothing."

"But do you feel it? Is it any comfort to you at all?"

"I ain't in any hurry to feel it. We'll get there. Don't worry. And s'pose
we don't! We're men. Man to man is good enough for me."

Paul spent some wakeful hours after that, trying not to think of Moya, of
his mother and Christine. They were of another world,--a world that dies
hard at twenty-four. Towards morning he slept, but not without dreams.

He was in the pent-road at Stone Ridge. It was sunset and long shadows
striped the lane. A man stood, back towards him, leaning both arms on the
stone fence that bounds the lane to the eastward,--a plain farmer figure,
gazing down across the misty fields as he might have stood a hundred times
in that place at that hour. Paul could not see his face, but something
told him who it must be. His heart stood still, for he saw his mother
coming up the lane. She carried something in her hand covered with a
napkin, and she smiled, walking carefully as if carrying a treat to a sick
child. She passed the man at the fence, not appearing to have seen him.

"Won't you speak to him, mother? Won't you speak to"--He could not utter
the name. She looked at him bewildered. "Speak? who shall I speak to?" The
man at the fence had turned and he watched her, or so Paul imagined. He
felt himself choking, faint, with the effort to speak that one word. Too
late! The moment passed. The man whom he knew was his father, the solemn,
quiet figure, moved away up the road unquestioned. He never looked back.
Paul grew dizzy with the lines of shadow; they stretched on and on, they