their manifestations more frequent; what time, the open distaste for him, which his father had always evinced, had grown more and more marked. Little by little, and so gradually that he knew not when the understanding of these things first dawned upon him, it had been borne in upon his mind that he occupied in the household a place apart, an alien place; that his two small, snub-nosed, broad-faced brethren, who followed him like dogs, were as unlike him in mind as in body; that his mother loved him above all things, but with an affection which she dared not show in the presence of others; that his father hated him. He gave back hate for hate.
Vaguely all these memories were present with him now, as he sat, sobbing and shaken, on the grass by the moat's brink; and nebulous as a mist, the conviction that they had some intimate connection with the tumult from which he had fled, stole up and enveloped him. Certain words and phrases which had poured through the lips of the woman while she abused his mother—words which had lost themselves amid the excitement and the terrors with which the quarrel had smitten him—recurred now to his mind. Many of them still were meaningless to the child; but through the foul murk of them an idea seemed to loom. The mother who had borne him, and whom for all her waywardness he loved, was a wanton, and he a bastard. More. She was mocked for pride—pride in her sin—pride in him, who was the flaming badge of it.
