“He has been speculating.” She never stopped in her rushing walk. “I have known it for months, and I have been in torment.” There was a strange, scathed look on her face which gave the words a terrible reality. “He has had some heavy anxiety on his mind all the summer--what, I don’t know. But this is the end of it. Oh, my boy, my darling, what have I done that you should shut your mother out? I have slaved for you! I have slaved for you, and I will slave for you as long as I live! Why have you gone away from me?” She was not crying. To Falconer, watching her and listening to her, no tears could have been so terrible as that bitter, dry-eyed wail which seemed to him to echo in a void, where nothing answering to it could have been nurtured into life. The contrast between the artificial woman he had known hitherto, and the woman in the consuming anguish of her motherhood with whom he now found himself face to face, was so amazing that he could make no attempt to grapple with it. He took desperate and instinctive refuge in the practical. “Do you know anything of his City associations?” he said. She made a despairing gesture of negation. “I did!” she said hoarsely. “I did all I knew to keep in touch with him. Two months ago Marston Loring could have told me anything. But everything failed me! Everything crumbled away! They quarrelled.” Already, with that matter-of-fact tendency inherent in all men--and particularly in unimaginative men--which assimilates a revelation, and reduces it involuntarily to a commonplace, Falconer had become almost accustomed to the new point of view which had been forced upon him. The darkness was lifting, and he was aware of vast tracts of mental country, destitute of those landmarks which his soul loved, but no longer enveloped in a dense atmosphere of confusion.