A chill breath touched him and he drew back a little. For whom did her old eyes read the prayer? Eager to share her mourning, he gently laid hand on her bony shoulder, but she did not turn at his touch; only bent her head the lower over her book and let a little rising murmur escape her moving lips. At her failure to respond, he shuddered with a sudden uncanny sense of remoteness. Then a terrible desolation seized him. “She’s not herself any more, that’s it; childish, and they never told me. I’m too late, then. She’ll never see me more. And I meant to come, always; God knows, I meant to come.” Fearing to alarm the quiet figure with an outburst of the grief that choked him, he slipped out and sought the old bench under the hedge. Here the tranquillity of the little farm laid a soothing hand on him,—the sight of the speckledy hens pecking in the long grass; the white goats tethered at a safe distance from sheltered heaps of potatoes; a red cow, deep in the lush grass of the meadow, who swung her head threateningly at a decrepit setter that limped across her path. For a moment, looking at the old dog, he thought: “That’ll be Sojer; he’ll know me.” But at once, with newly swelling heart, he realized that many springs had drifted the white blossom of the thorn across old Sojer’s grave. A friendly yearning made him rise and seek this other dog, so like the companion of barefoot jaunts; a descendant of the old fellow’s, no doubt,—a bond across the hostile years. At the touch of his hand, the setter cowered away, shivering in every limb, his dark soft eyes full of anguished terror. When Christopher tried to speak reassuringly, the dog set up a sobbing whine, and, struggling to uncertain feet, hobbled for the house with his red-feathered tail between his legs. On Christopher, as he stood there in the sunny morning, a chill dark descended, and he felt isolated beyond the farthest star. Foreboding shuddered through him, but he cried obstinately, “No, I’ll not accept it! It can’t have come to me yet.” But, in spite of his gallant refusal, he turned, like a child from the night, to his mother, as if that little, age-worn woman could soothe his terror as of old. From the door, he saw her still seated on the hearth, which looked ominously black now and desolate. Her bent finger held the dread place in her book, and, with her right hand, she caressed the head of the old setter, who was crowding to her knees and whining woefully. For the first time, Christopher heard the broken quaver of her voice.