He saw that she had been crying, and as quickly she knew that the boy was in a like agony of mind. There was only one swift look—a mutual recognition of a mutual betrayal—but no word passed then nor when they walked together back to the house, for race and relationship made no word possible. Within the house Jason noticed his mother's eyes fixed anxiously on him, and when Mavis was clearing up in the kitchen after supper, she subtly shifted her solicitude to the girl in order to draw some confession from her son.
"Mavis wants to go back to the mountains."
The ruse worked, for Jason looked up quickly and then into the fire while the mother waited.
"Sometimes I want to go back myself," he said wearily; "it's gittin' too much for me here."
Martha Hawn looked at her husband stretched on the bed in a drunken sleep and began to cry softly.
"It's al'ays been too much fer me," she sobbed. "I've al'ays wanted to go back."
For the first time Jason began to think how lonely her life must be, and, perhaps as the result of his own suffering, his heart suddenly began to ache for her.
"Don't worry, mammy—I'll take ye back some day."
Mavis came back from the kitchen. Again she had been crying. Again the same keen look passed between them and with only that look Jason climbed the stairs to her room. As his eyes wandered about the familiar touches the hand of civilization had added to the bare little chamber it once was, he saw on the dresser of varnished pine one touch of that hand that he had never noticed before—the picture of Gray Pendleton. Evidently Mavis had forgotten to put it away, and Jason looked at it curiously a moment—the frank face, strong mouth, and winning smile—but he never noticed that it was placed where she could see it when she kneeled at her bedside, and never guessed that it was the last earthly thing her eyes rested on before darkness closed about her, and that the girl took its image upward with her even in her prayers.