"Yes."
"I have known that for some little time. Your uncle might have told me more, but I wouldn't let him. There has never been anything between us to break confidence, Tom. I knew you would tell me yourself, when the time came."
"I have come to tell you to-night, mammy. You must hear it all, from beginning to end. It goes back a long way—back to the time when you used to let me kneel with my head in your lap to say my prayers; when you used to think I was good...."
The fire had died down to a few glowing masses of coke on the grate bars when he had finished the story of his wanderings in the valley of dry bones. Through it all, Martha Gordon had sat silent and rigid, her thin hands lying clasped in her lap, and her low willow rocking-chair barely moving at the touch of her foot on the fender.
But when it was over; when Tom, his voice breaking in spite of his efforts to control it, told her that he could walk in the way she had chosen for him only at the price a conscious hypocrite must pay, she reached up quickly and took him in her arms and wept over him as those who sorrow without hope, crying again and again, "O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!"
XVIII
THE AWAKENING
Once in a lifetime for every youngling climbing the facile or difficult slope of the years there comes a day of realization, of a sudden extension of vision, of Rubicon-crossing from the hither shore of joyous and irresponsible adolescence to that further one of conscious grapplings with the adult fact.