Calvin had thought this many times before; but to-day the realization of her restraint filled him with unusual feeling. He almost dropped his bag and ran to her; but he remembered himself and carried the bag to the step where he laid it down; he caught his mother's hands and clasped them while he kissed her on her turned cheek. Then she kissed him on the cheek with her cool lips.
"I had your telegram," she said. "Your room is ready for you, Calvin."
He squeezed her hands with an impulse which surprised her. "I knew it would be," he replied, releasing her. "You're well, mother, aren't you?"
"Yes," she answered, but he knew she was not thinking of herself, but was studying him with her steady gray eyes. "I am always well, merely a year older. I see you are well. You had a good trip?"
"Very good," he replied and corrected, saying, "It was all right. The train, of course, was comfortable."
"What do you mean?" said his mother. "Did something happen?"
"Nothing happened," assured Calvin, wondering at himself for the correction he had made. Nothing had happened on the train—nothing which he could relate to his mother. "I'll go up to my room," he said, almost hastily, and picked up his bag and entered the house of 1722 and Queen Anne's war and John Adam's administration and Antietam.
It was not actually the house of Queen Anne's war; for that had been the original cabin which the Indians had burned. Calvin confused it thus, momentarily, because his mind was full of the phrase of the Royle girl and he was queerly sensitive to impressions to-day.
He felt, at this moment, the force of contrasts which never had affected him similarly, as his mind bore an image of the newly rented room with the bed-couch,
