"Good morning, my boy," said the old man. "I trust you slept well?"
Chris slowly let himself down into the offered chair. "Oh yes, thank you sir," he replied. "I don't even know how I got to bed."
Mr. Wicker made a sound that seemed to indicate that that did not matter.
"And breakfast?" Mr. Wicker asked. "Becky fed you?"
"Yes sir. And Mr. Cilley—he fed me too."
"Indeed?" Mr. Wicker's eyebrows went up in an inverted V above his bright dark eyes. "Ned Cilley so early? Well, he is a loyal soul, is Cilley. You shall know more of him."
He fell silent, observing the boy sitting on the edge of the big chair. Mr. Wicker looked, as if casually, at the clothes Chris now wore and which fitted him as though made to his measure. What he saw seemed to please the old man for he nodded his bald head and his wrinkles multiplied themselves across his face in a way Chris took to be his smile. At last he spoke again, and his voice was strangely gentle and kind. So kind that the forlornness Chris had momentarily forgotten at the mystery of his position, the puzzlement and lost feeling that reclaimed him instantly should he allow himself to wonder at how he could get back again into his own life and time, was reawakened by the something he heard in Mr. Wicker's voice. The tears gathered in his throat and he had to swallow and cough several times before he could reply with any degree of clearness.
"Feel? Well—all right, I guess, in a way. But there's a sort of spinning in my head and my stomach if I try to figure any of this out. I just don't get it." He shook his head dubiously. "I feel alive all right, and the food tasted good just now, but how in the world can all the changes come about, or be? And there's something I should see to, at home—" All at once he needed desperately to know how his mother was, that morning. He stood up abruptly.