He raised his eyebrows with a humorous, unequal lift, and looked deeply into the water he thus appropriated. He was amused, a little dismayed by a mood in which he tuned the world's music to his own key. His ambition might have seen men and things alike conquerable by his mind, but his vanity had never heard them as a refrain to the song of self, yet now a sparkling morning, a whistling bird, and wet grasses brushing on his feet, had made a coxcomb of him. That was the epithet he chose to use, for his proud youth would not confess the power of a summer morning on his austerity; yet, as he took the plunge into water which still held a memory of the snows, he was grateful to a cold that vanquished sentiment, and gave back freedom to the mountain stream. He felt he ought to ask its pardon on his knees, but he did not pause in his drying: the feeling, he thought characteristically, was enough, and, lifting his brows again and twisting his lips in company, he decided to keep the kneeling posture for the time when he should have learnt to pray, and with the remembrance that he had been at worship, if not at prayer, as he stood by his window and divined the immeasurable presence of God, he walked home soberly, absorbed in the problems of his own spirit, and heedless of the geese that cackled after him. He found his mother kindling the kitchen fire and he watched her as he sat on the table and dried his hair. He had, for everything concerning her, an eye as keen as that of a woman or a lover: he took pleasure in the sure quickness of her hands, and the clear skin on the cheek she turned to him, yet his gaze had that parental quality which, still unsuspected, had influenced his dealings with her from boyhood. He saw how the brave back defied the grey that crept unwillingly through her hair, and he knew that neither age nor sorrow would ever daunt her, because love had given her an invincible supremacy. Years ago, with the wisdom of the threatened, her heart had challenged her mind to combat, and had beaten it, and thereafter she had made of it an ally, so that her defences were unassailable and her fears at rest. He understood. Had he not watched it all? At first he had seen her little shifts with scorn, he had felt pity for her determined blindness, and then his own sight had been cleared, and he looked straight into a maternal heart that awed him, though it pulsed so eagerly for the father that there was hardly room for the son. His training had been a hard and useful one, and his passions were well chained: he was rarely resentful: what was noble in him was truly glad of her captured happiness, and he had learnt to use towards her the indulgent tenderness which she kept for his father. He laid aside his towel and stood up. "Let me do that for you." She gave the laugh, not to be silenced by experience or proof, of the capable woman who hears man offering to do her work.