lives.  No one suspected the secret.  To the ordinary beholder, the man seemed accoutred in the ordinary fashion of soldiers; but, whenever a bullet struck him, it glanced off harmlessly as if turned back by a spell.  It was so with Stephen White’s silence:  in ordinary intercourse, he was social genial; he talked more than average men talk; he took or seemed to take, more interest than men usually take in the common small talk of average people; but the instant there was a manifestation of anger, of discord of any thing unpleasant, he entrenched himself in silence.  This was especially the case when he was reproached or aroused by his mother.  It was often more provoking to her than any amount of retort or recrimination could have been.  She had in her nature a certain sort of slow ugliness which delighted in dwelling upon a small offence, in asking irritating questions about it, in reiterating its details; all the while making it out a matter of personal unkindness or indifference to her that it should have happened.  When she was in these moods, Stephen’s silence sometimes provoked her past endurance.

“Can’t you speak, Stephen?” she would exclaim.

“What would be the use, mother?” he would say sadly.  “If you do not know that the great aim of my life is to make you happy, it is of no use for me to keep on saying it.  If it would make you any happier to keep on discussing and discussing this question indefinitely, I would endure even that; but it would not.”

To do Mrs. White justice, she was generally ashamed of these ebullitions of unreasonable ill-temper, and endeavored to atone for them afterward by being more than ordinarily affectionate and loving in her manner towards Stephen.  But her shame was short-lived, and never made her any the less unreasonable or exacting when the next occasion occurred; so that, although Stephen received her affectionate epithets and caresses with filial responsiveness, he was never in the slightest degree deluded by them.  He took them for what they were worth, and held himself no whit freer from constraint, no whit less ready for the next storm.  By the very fact of the greater fineness of his organization, this tyrannical woman held him chained.  His submission to her would have seemed abject, if it had not been based on a sentiment and grounded in a loyalty which compelled respect.  He had accepted this burden as the one great duty of his life; and, whatever became of him, whatever became of his life, the burden should be carried.  This helpless woman, who stood to him in the relation of mother, should be made happy.  From the moment of his father’s death, he had assumed this obligation as a sacrament; and, if it lasted his life out, he would never dream of evading or lessening it.  In this fine fibre of loyalty, Stephen White and Mercy Philbrick were alike:  though it was in him more an exalted sentiment; in her, simply an organic necessity.  In him, it would always have been in danger of taking morbid