she knitted so quickly that the clicking of her needles was like the quick plucking of strings from which all sweetness had gone; but her face was impassive—still and fine and reserved like a yellowing old ivory god brought from Bengal to stare unmoved upon the fretting of the West.
Richard looked at his mother and her eyes, lifting a second as at a summons, caught his. He tried to look boldly and challenge her with a glance; but it was his eyes that fell beneath quivering lids, and his courage that died. His mother still knitted steadily on and then, as if nothing had passed between them even while this mute challenge had sprung and quailed, she said:
"It's bedtime, Richard." His heart murmured, but his will was sunken into weakness.
It took him some time to get to sleep and he was restless, it seemed, all through restless centuries. The sound of a river soothed him and then excited him, for it was a shallow rapid river, with infinitesimal reflections beneath the water—gold, gold dust, gold particles clinging to the yellow pebbles. Huge black natives came stumbling towards him, sinister presences brandishing their arms and threatening, not him, but some other. They were threatening his father, but he could nowhere see him. "Father, father!" he cried, and rose from the bed; "Father, come away, come away from the Gold Coast."
It seemed that Myra Alexander was holding his arms firmly and leading him from the huge natives. "Father—Myra!" he muttered. The shining candle woke him, and the face that was Myra's became his mother's. "I thought I heard—" and then, remembering the rebuke of his mother's presence earlier in the evening, he said no more.
