Mrs. Kinloch encouraged her son to persevere; she was sure he had not been skilful.  “Mildred,” she said, “was not to be won with as little trouble as a silly, low-bred girl, like—­like Lucy, for instance.”

“What the deuse are you always bringing up Lucy to me for?” said the dutiful son.

“Don’t speak so!”

“Confound it!  I must.  You keep a fellow shut up here for six months, going to meeting five times a week; you give him no chance to work off his natural spirits, and the devil in him will break out somewhere.  It’s putting a stopper in a volcano; if you don’t allow a little fire and smoke, you’re bound to have an earthquake.”

After this philosophical digression, the first topic was resumed, and Mrs. Kinloch gave the young man some counsel, drawn from her own experience or observation, touching the proper mode of awakening and cultivating the tender passion.  It is not every mother that does so much for her son, but then few mothers have so urgent a motive.

“What was it that she advised him to do,” did you ask?  Really, I’ve quite forgotten; and I am sure Mrs. Kinloch forgot also, at least for that day, because something occurred which turned her thoughts for the time in quite a different direction.

The ponies were brought out for Hugh and Mildred to take their customary canter.  The young heiress, for whom so much time and pains were spent, looked ill; the delicate flush had vanished from her cheek; she seemed languid, and cheerful only by effort.  A moment after they had gone, as Mrs. Kinloch closed the door, for it was a raw November day, she saw and picked up a rudely-folded letter in the hall.  “Good-bye, Lucy Ransom,” were the words she read.  They were enough.  Mrs. Kinloch felt that her heart was struck by a bolt of ice.  “Poor, misguided, miserable girl!” she said.  “Why did I not see that something was wrong?  I felt it, I knew it,—­but only as one knows of evil in a dream.  Who can calculate the mischief that will come of this?  O God! to have my hopes of so many years ruined, destroyed, by a wretch whose power and existence even I had not once thought of!  Has she drowned herself, or fled to the city to hide her disgrace?  But if this should be imagination merely!  She may have run away with some lubberly fellow from the factory, whom she was ashamed to marry at home.  But no! she was too sad last evening when she asked to go to her grandmother’s for a day.  What if”—­The thought coursed round her brain like fire on a train of gunpowder,—­flew quicker than words could utter it; and the woman bounded to her bureau, as though with muscles of steel.  She clutched at the papers and bank-notes in her private drawer, and looked and counted them over a dozen times before she could satisfy herself.  Her thin fingers nervously opened the packages and folds,—­the papers crackling as her eye glanced over them.  They were there; but not all.  She pored over the mystery,—­her