In the strange, wakeful nights, full of starvation dreams, he saw his mother as she would look on state occasions in the hostess's place at her luxurious table; the odor of flowers, the smell of meats and wines, tantalized and sickened him. Christine would come in her dancing frocks, always laughing, greedy in her mirth; but Moya, face to face, he could never see. It was torture to feel her near him, a disembodied embrace. Passionate panegyrics and hopeless adjurations he would pour out to that hovering loveliness just beyond his reach. The agony of frustration would waken him, if indeed it were sleep that dissolved his consciousness, and he would be irritable if spoken to. The packer broke in, one morning, on these unnerving dreams. “You wouldn't happen to have a picture of her along with you?” Paul stared at him. “No, of course you wouldn't! And I'd be 'most afeard to look at it, if you had. She must have changed considerable. Time hasn't stood still with her any more than the rest of us.” “I have no picture of my mother,” Paul replied. The packer saw that his question had jarred; he had waited weeks to ask it. He passed it off now with one of his homely similes. “If you was to break a cup clean in two, and put the halves together again while the break was fresh, they'd knit so you wouldn't hardly see a crack. But you take one half and set it in the chainy closet and chuck the other half out on the ash-heap,--them halves won't look much like pieces of the same cup, come a year or two. The edges won't jine no more than the lips of an old cut that's healed without stitches. No; married folks they grow together or they grow apart, and they're a-doing of the one or the other every minute of the time, breaks or no breaks. Does she go up to the old place summers?” “Not lately, except on business,” said Paul. “A company was formed to open slate quarries on the upper farm, a good many years ago. They are worth more than all the land forty times over.” “I always said so; always told the old man he had a gold mine in that ridge. Was this before he died?” “Long after. It was my mother's scheme mainly. She controls it now. She is a very strong business woman.”