For she herself had sprung from a radically different stock:  from sanguine, hot-blooded men; congressmen shaping the worldly history of their fellow-beings and leaving the non-worldly to take care of itself; soldiers illustrious in the army and navy; hale country gentlemen who took the lead in the country’s hardy sports and pleasures; all sowing their wild oats early in life with hands that no power could stay; not always living to reap, but always leaving enough reaping to be done by the sad innocent who never sow; fathers of large families; and even when breaking the hearts of their wives, never losing their love; for with their large open frailties being men without crime and cowardice, tyrannies, meannesses.

With these two unlike hereditary strains before her she had, during the years, slowly devised the maternal philosophy of her sons.

Out of those grave mental workers had come Dent—­her student.  She loved to believe that in the making of him her own blood asserted itself by drawing him away from the tyrannical interpretation of God to the neutral investigation of the earth, from black theology to sunlit science—­so leaving him at work and at peace, the ancestral antagonisms becoming neutralized by being blended.

But Rowan! while he was yet a little fellow, and she and her young husband would sit watching him at play, characteristics revealed themselves which led her to shake her head rebukingly and say:  “He gets these traits from you.”  At other times contradictory characteristics appeared and the father, looking silently at her, would in effect inquire:  “Whence does he derive these?” On both accounts she began to look with apprehension toward this son’s maturing years.  And always, as the years passed, evidence was forced more plainly upon her that in him the two natures he inherited were antagonistic still; each alternately uppermost; both in unceasing warfare; thus endowing him with a double nature which might in time lead him to a double life.  So that even then she had begun to take upon herself the burden of dreading lest she should not only be the mother of his life, but the mother of his tragedies.  She went over this again and again:  “Am I to be the mother of his tragedies?”

As she sat this young summer morning after he had left her so strangely, all at once the world became autumn to her remembrance.

An autumn morning:  the rays of the sun shining upon the silvery mists swathing the trees outside, upon the wet and many-colored leaves; a little frost on the dark grass here and there; the first fires lighted within; the carriage already waiting at the door; the breakfast hurriedly choked down—­in silence; the mournful noise of his trunk being brought downstairs—­his first trunk.  Then the going out upon the veranda and the saying good-by to him; and then—­the carriage disappearing in the silver mists, with a few red and yellow leaves whirled high from the wheels.