for the forest; and now, by the edge of the moat, he had thrown himself down in the shade, to recover his breath, and still the frantic beating of his heart.
His mother had always been to him a creature vaguely mysterious. Sometimes, when he and she were alone together, she would suddenly fling soft arms around him and draw his head down against her breasts-bruising him with her violence, it might be—while she crooned over him with words of extravagant affection. But when the man, his father, was at hand—home from the quarries or the rice-fields—her spasmodic love seemed instantly to evaporate, leaving her the cold, silent, passionless drudge of every day.
Childlike, he had never spoken to her or to others of these strange outbursts of a love that seemed to have in it something at once fierce, hungry, and ashamed; but often as he sat watching her, busied over household tasks, or emitting monosyllabic replies to the discontented grumblings of her man, their master, he would fall to wondering whether his memory and his imagination were not playing the cheat, whether, in truth, this immobile woman was one with the raving, passion-torn creature who on occasion usurped her place.
And as he had grown older, and his features had begun to emerge from the rounded shapelessness of childhood into their present clean-cut beauty, his mother's carefully concealed love and adoration of him had become more intense,
