the power of which he was the representative than of the man himself:  the power to take to himself a wife—­a wife who would give an heir to Thornby Place.  This was to be the achievement of Mrs Norton’s life, and the difficulties that intervened were too absorbing for her to think much whether her son would find happiness in marriage; nor was it natural to her to set much store on the refining charm and the uniting influences of mental sympathies.  Had she not passed the age when the sentimental emotions are liveliest?  And the fibre was wanting in her to take into much account the whispering or the silence of passion.

Mrs Norton saw in marriage nothing but the child, and in the child nothing but an heir—­that is to say, a male who would continue the name and traditions of Thornby Place.  This would seem to indicate a material nature, but such a misapprehension arises from the common habit of confusing pure thought—­thought which proceeds direct from the brain and lives uncoloured by the material wants of life—­with instincts whose complexity often causes them to appear as mental potentialities, whereas they are but instincts, inherited promptings, and aversions more or less modified by physical constitution and the material forces of the life in which the constitution has grown up; and yet, though pure thought, that is to say the power of detaching oneself from the webs of life and viewing men and things from a height, is the rarest of gifts, many are possessed of sufficient intellectuality to enjoy with the brain apart from the senses.  Mrs Norton was such an one.  After five o’clock tea she would ask Kitty to read to her, and drawing her shawl about her shoulders, would readily abandon the intellectual side of her nature to the seductive charm of the romantic story of James of Scotland; and while to the girl the heroism and chivalry were a little clouded by the quaint turns of Rossetti’s verse, to the woman these were added delights, which her quiet penetrating understanding followed and took instant note of.

“Were mother and son ever so different?” was the common remark.  The artistic was the side of Mrs Norton’s character that was unaffectedly kept out of sight, just as young John Norton was careful to hide from public knowledge his strict business habits, and to expose, perhaps a little ostentatiously, the spiritual impulses in which he was so deeply concerned:  the subtle refinement of sacred places, from the mystery of the great window with its mitres and croziers to the sunlit path between the tombs where the children play, the curious and yet natural charm that attendance in the sacristy had for him, the arrangement of the large oak presses, wherein are stored the fine altar linen and the chalices, the distributing of the wine and water that were not for bodily need, and the wearing of the flowing surplices, the murmuring of the Latin responses that helped so wonderfully to enforce the impression of beautiful and refined life which was