Now, it was very well that Mrs. Gregory did not hear this kind speech, for, however she may have affected her neighbours, it is very certain that she had not the least desire to be eccentric. And indeed the peculiarity which set all these busy tongues wagging had more to do with her son than with herself. His appearance, to begin with--how did he come to be so curiously, so abnormally, different from his mother? No one seeing them together could have imagined that they were closely related. She was one of those large, fair women--placid in temper and gentle in manner--who develop naturally out of the lily-white blonde of poetry and romance when she is foolish enough to step across the boundary that divides youth from middle age. He had the lithe figure, the olive skin, and the dark melting eyes that are supposed to belong to the great southern races. The observant said there was something more. They said that the boy's expression of face divided him more completely from his mother than its colour and form. I am speaking now of his childish years. They say--I did not myself know him in these days--that there was a wonderful stillness, a curious, unchildlike spirituality about him; that he looked now and then as if his little soul were in the presence of visions which made the things of earth strange to him. This was noticed once to his mother by a garrulous neighbour, and the anger with which she received the remark was remembered long after in the neighbourhood. As a fact, the poor woman, placid as she seemed, had her own strongly-marked ideals. When her infant was born, and she called him Tom--a name which the neighbours said did not suit him in the least--she had visions of him in the future as a fair-haired, white-skinned Anglo-Saxon athlete, a cricketing and footballing hero, winning the plaudits of the crowd and provoking the envy of meaner mortals by his magnificent feats. Nature, however, had other views for the lad. But of this we shall see more hereafter. In the meantime it must be mentioned that the curious difference between the mother and son was not their only peculiarity. It was whispered that there was something strange--and we all know how much may lurk behind those two little words--in their past history. That Mrs. Gregory had spent several of her early years in India, where her grandfather, Sir Anthony Bracebridge, had been one of those fine old Anglo-Indian officers who by their military dash and political genius laid the foundation of the vast English empire that was then slowly growing up in the East; that her father had in his turn entered the service of the East India Company and won distinction; and that her husband, Captain Gregory, had belonged to the same order, and had been killed in one of the little wars about which no one in England knew anything;--so much everyone had heard, and this, it might have been thought, was sufficient for the most exacting of neighbourhoods. And no one,