That was the last of the first Rowan,—­youth at the threshold of manhood.  Now off for college, to his university in New England.  As his father and she stood side by side (he being too frail to take that chill morning ride with his son) he waved his hand protectingly after him, crying out:  “He is a good boy.”  And she, having some wide vision of other mothers of the land who during these same autumn days were bidding God-speed to their idols—­picked youth of the republic—­she with some wide vision of this large fact stood a proud mother among them all, feeling sure that he would take foremost place in his college for good honest work and for high character and gentle manners and gallant bearing—­with not a dark spot in him.

It was toward the close of the first session, after she had learned the one kind of letter he always wrote, that his letters changed.  She could not have explained how they were changed, could not have held the pages up to the inspection of any one else and have said, “See! it is here.”  But she knew it was there, and it stayed there.  She waited for his father to notice it; but if he ever noticed it, he never told her:  nor did she ever confide her discovery to him.

When vacation came, it brought a request from Rowan that he might be allowed to spend the summer with college friends farther north—­camping, fishing, hunting, sailing, seeing more of his country.  His father’s consent was more ready than her own.  The second session passed and with the second vacation the request was renewed.  “Why does he not come home?  Why does he not wish to come home?” she said, wandering restlessly over the house with his letter in her hands; going up to his bedroom and sitting down in the silence of it and looking at his bed—­which seemed so strangely white that day—­looking at all the preparations she had made for his comfort.  “Why does he not come?”

Near the close of the third session he came quickly enough, summoned by his father’s short fatal illness.

Some time passed before she observed anything in him but natural changes after so long an absence and grief over his great loss.  He shut himself in his room for some days, having it out alone with himself, a young man’s first solemn accounting to a father who has become a memory.  Gradually there began to emerge his new care of her, and tenderness, a boy’s no more.  And he stepped forward easily into his place as the head of affairs, as his brother’s guardian.  But as time wore on and she grew used to him as so much older in mere course of nature, and as graver by his loss and his fresh responsibilities, she made allowances for all these and brushed them away and beheld constantly beneath them that other change.

Often while she sat near him when they were reading, she would look up and note that unaware a shadow had stolen out on his face.  She studied that shadow.  And one consolation she drew:  that whatsoever the cause, it was nothing by which he felt dishonored.  At such moments her love broke over him with intolerable longings.  She remembered things that her mother had told her about her father; she recalled the lives of her brothers, his uncles.  She yearned to say:  “What is it, Rowan?  You can tell me anything, anything.  I know so much more than you believe.”