Mrs. Marvyn was so constantly thinking of him, that it was difficult to begin on any topic that did not in some manner or other knit itself into the one ever present in her thoughts.  None of the peculiar developments of the female nature have a more exquisite vitality than the sentiment of a frail, delicate, repressed, timid woman for a strong, manly, generous son.  There is her ideal expressed; there is the out-speaking and out-acting of all she trembles to think, yet burns to say or do; here is the hero that shall speak for her, the heart into which she has poured hers, and that shall give to her tremulous and hidden aspirations a strong and victorious expression.  “I have gotten a man from the Lord,” she says to herself; and each outburst of his manliness, his vigor, his self-confidence, his superb vitality, fills her with a strange, wondering pleasure, and she has a secret tenderness and pride even in his wilfulness and waywardness.  “What a creature he is!” she says, when he flouts at sober argument and pitches all received opinions hither and thither in the wild capriciousness of youthful paradox.  She looks grave and reproving; but he reads the concealed triumph in her eyes,—­he knows that in her heart she is full of admiration all the time.  First love of womanhood is something wonderful and mysterious,—­but in this second love it rises again, idealized and refined; she loves the father and herself united and made one in this young heir of life and hope.

Such was Mrs. Marvyn’s still intense, passionate love for her son.  Not a tone of his manly voice, not a flash of his dark eyes, not one of the deep, shadowy dimples that came and went as he laughed, not a ring of his glossy black hair, that was not studied, got by heart, and dwelt on in the inner shrine of her thoughts; he was the romance of her life.  His strong, daring nature carried her with it beyond those narrow, daily bounds where her soul was weary of treading; and just as his voyages had given to the trite prose of her menage a poetry of strange, foreign perfumes, of quaint objects of interest, speaking of many a far-off shore, so his mind and life were a constant channel of outreach through which her soul held converse with the active and stirring world.  Mrs. Marvyn had known all the story of her son’s love, and to no other woman would she have been willing to resign him; but her love to Mary was so deep, that she thought of his union with her more as gaining a daughter than as losing a son.  She would not speak of the subject; she knew the feelings of Mary’s mother; and the name of James fell so often from her lips, simply because it was so ever-present in her heart that it could not be helped.

Before Mary left, it was arranged that they should study together, and that the lessons should be given alternately at each other’s houses; and with this understanding they parted.

[To be continued.]

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