When he returned to the house he saw his mother walking on the front pavement; she held flowers freshly plucked for the breakfast table:  a woman of large mould, grave, proud, noble; an ideal of her place and time.

“Is the lord of the manor ready for his breakfast?” she asked as she came forward, smiling.

“I am ready, mother,” he replied without smiling, touching his lips to her cheek.

She linked her arm in his as they ascended the steps.  At the top she drew him gently around until they faced the landscape rolling wide before them.

“It is so beautiful!” she exclaimed with a deep narrow love of her land.  “I never see it without thinking of it as it will be years hence.  I can see you riding over it then and your children playing around the house and some one sitting here where we stand, watching them at their play and watching you in the distance at your work.  But I have been waiting a long time for her to take my place—­and to take her own,” and she leaned heavily on his arm as a sign of her dependence but out of weakness also (for she did not tell him all).  “I am impatient to hear the voice of your children, Rowan.  Do you never wish to hear them yourself?”

As they stood silent, footsteps approached through the hall and turning they saw Dent with a book in his hand.

“Are you grand people never coming to breakfast?” he asked, frowning with pretended impatience, “so that a laboring man may go to his work?”

He was of short but well-knit figure.  Spectacles and a thoughtful face of great refinement gave him the student’s stamp.  His undergraduate course at college would end in a few weeks.  Postgraduate work was to begin during the summer.  An assistant professorship, then a full professorship—­these were successive stations already marked by him on the clear track of life; and he was now moving toward them with straight and steady aim.  Sometimes we encounter personalities which seem to move through the discords of this life as though guided by laws of harmony; they know neither outward check nor inward swerving, and are endowed with that peaceful passion for toil which does the world’s work and is one of the marks of genius.

He was one of these—­a growth of the new time not comprehended by his mother.  She could neither understand it nor him.  The pain which this had given him at first he had soon outgrown; and what might have been a tragedy to another nature melted away in the steady sunlight of his entire reasonableness.  Perhaps he realized that the scientific son can never be the idol of a household until he is born of scientific parents.

As mother and elder son now turned to greet him, the mother was not herself aware that she still leaned upon the arm of Rowan and that Dent walked into the breakfast room alone.

Less than usual was said during the meal.  They were a reserved household, inclined to the small nobilities of silence. (It is questionable whether talkative families ever have much to say.) This morning each had especial reason for self-communing.