to her nature; but stronger than compassion, stronger even than reason, was the instinct of evasive idealism which the generations had bred.  He understood, while he looked down on her white hair and unlined face, that even if he took her with him to that basement room, she would see it not as it actually was, but as she wished it to be.  Her romanticism was invulnerable because it had no contact, even through imagination, with the edge of reality.

And he knew also, while she held him in her motherly arms, that something had broken down within his soul—­some barrier between himself and humanity.  The wall of tradition and sentiment no longer divided him from Darrow, or Gideon Vetch, or the man who could not look at anything but the hole in the carpet.  Never again could he take his inherited place in the world of which he had once been a part.  For an instant a nervous impulse to protest, to startle by some violent gesture that look of gentle self-esteem from the faces before him, jerked over him like a spasm.  Then the last habit that he would ever break in his life, the very law of his being, which was the law of order, of manners, of self-control, the inbred horror, older than himself or his parents, of giving himself away, of making a scene of his own emotions, this ancestral custom of good breeding closed over him like the lid of a coffin.

With a smile he looked into the anxious face of his father.  “Isn’t there some way out of it, Dad?”

The muscles about Mr. Culpeper’s mouth contracted as if he were going to cry; but when he spoke his voice was completely under control.  “I can’t interfere, son, with the way the agent manages the property,” he answered, “but, of course, if you have discovered a peculiarly distressing case—­if it is an object of charity—­”

He paused abruptly in amazement, for Stephen was laughing, laughing in a way, as Mrs. Culpeper remarked afterward, that nobody had ever even thought of laughing before the whole world had become demoralized.

“Damn charity!” he exclaimed hilariously.  “I beg your pardon, Mother, but if you only knew how inexpressibly funny it is!” Then the laughter stopped, and a wistful look came into his eyes, for beyond the broken walls he saw Patty Vetch in her red cape, and around her stretched the wind-swept roads of that hidden country.

A minute later, as he left the room, his mother’s eyes followed him anxiously.  “Poor boy, we must bear with him,” she said in melting maternal accents.

CHAPTER XIII

CORINNA WONDERS

After a winter of Italian skies spring had come in a night.  It was a morning in April, blue and soft as a cloud, with a roving fragrance of lilacs and hyacinths in the air.  Already the early bloom of the orchard had dropped, and the freshly ploughed fields, with splashes of henna in the dun-coloured soil, were surrounded by the budding green of the woods.