"No, it's alight at last. The sticks were damp. You forgot to bring them in last night." "I'm sorry." "I'll see to them in future." "Oh, isn't that just you! I forget, once in three months, perhaps, and you talk as though it were only that once that I'd remembered." She sat on her heels and smiled at him. "Nonsense! I'm juster than you, my son! And I like doing my own work." "But this is mine. I gathered kindling wood for you as soon as I could walk, and I used the chopper before most children are allowed a table-knife. The smell of the woodshed and the fear I had of it at night! The door has the same creak yet, when there's a strong wind from the sea. I've suffered torments, crossing the yard in the dark, and I have my reward in remembering them. I'm going to get the wood for you till the end of time. It's bound up with the thought of the geese, and the smell of earth, and the sound of bees in the heather, and the wonder if I'll see my father striding out into the black when I'm coming in with my arms full. And it's queer how you end by loving the bad memories best. I think it will be because we're all proud to look back on trouble." She heard disloyalty in his words. "Trouble! How much of it have you had? You've had your way in everything, you've never been thwarted." Her voice dared him to speak his thoughts. He was silent, but he had a vision of a small and solitary boy's figure moving always under a cloud that might open to let out thunderbolts. How he had feared, hated, and at last, when it failed to do more than darken his days, how he had despised it! He looked in a kind of wonder at his mother. Her hands were folded in her lap in a pretence of calm, but he knew she held them tightly, that her heart went a little faster in her anger. Had she been unaware of his sufferings, or had she chosen to ignore them? Now, it did not matter. The horror was over: it had helped to make him what he was, and, were that good or bad, he answered truthfully when she turned to him with a sharp: "Well, why don't you speak?" He was smiling faintly. The lips which had been petulant in boyhood had taken on firmer, straighter lines that refused the indignity of easy rage. "I'd not change a day of my life for that of any other man," he said cheerfully. She was a little suspicious of his meaning, but she had to take it at its best. She rose and put a hand on his arm. "Out of my way, Alexander, if you want breakfast. Why did you get up so early on a Saturday?" "Ask the sun." "Shall I give you a dark curtain?" "No; I'll go without sleep rather than have my window blinded. What would I do when I waked in the night if I couldn't see my hills?" "Sleep again the sooner, perhaps. No wonder I can't make my candles last. Alec, you're not to touch a book to-day." "Come for a walk with me, then." "Get Janet." "No, she can't walk like you. Come."