the former were thick with callosities, and the soles of the latter horny with use.
But the most arresting feature of the child were his eyes. They were large and very dark, full of dreams and shadows, and they looked out from under heavily marked eyebrows, black as his hair. They gave to him, at all times, an air of solemn, unchildlike wisdom, and at this moment they were full of trouble and swimming in tears.
The actual cause of his grief was felt rather than realised. He had come hither, seeking solitude and refuge, from his parents' hut, and shaken to the very depths of his being by the storm of elemental passions which of a sudden had burst above his head. Dimly he understood that he, in some inexplicable fashion, had been used as a missile in the fray, from the din of which he had escaped.
There had been shrill word-battle between his mother and a neighbour, over a matter of a broken cooking-pot—warfare that dredged up from the slime of two angry women's souls vile thoughts, and viler words in which to clothe them. Without warning, the panic-stricken little boy had found himself in the heart of an emotional cataclysm whose fury tortured his nerves, while the very intensity of his distress numbed and paralysed his understanding.
He had fled—pursued by he knew not what, phantoms of horror and suggestion—and following some obscure primordial instinct, had headed
