It was not likely she would marry.  Why should she desire it?  From any blundering tragedy a woman of so acute a brain would, of course, know how to protect herself.  But within the limits of her life, why should she refuse herself happiness, intimacy, love?

His heart beat fast; his thoughts were in a whirl.  But the train was nearing Portsmouth, and with an effort he recalled his mind to the meeting with his mother, which was then close upon him.

He spent nearly a week in the little cottage at Sea View, and Mrs. Warkworth got far more pleasure than usual, poor lady, out of his visit.  She was a thin, plain woman, not devoid of either ability or character.  But life had gone hardly with her, and since her husband’s death what had been reserve had become melancholy.  She had always been afraid of her only son since they had sent him to Charterhouse, and he had become so much “finer” than his parents.  She knew that he must consider her a very ignorant and narrow-minded person; when he was with her she was humiliated in her own eyes, though as soon as he was gone she resumed what was in truth a leading place among her own small circle.

She loved him, and was proud of him; yet at the bottom of her heart she had never absolved him from his father’s death.  But for his extravagance, and the misfortunes he had brought upon them, her old general would be alive still—­pottering about in the spring sunshine, spudding the daisies from the turf, or smoking his pipe beneath the thickening trees.  Silently her heart still yearned and hungered for the husband of her youth; his son did not replace him.

Nevertheless, when he came down to her with this halo of glory upon him, and smoked up and down her small garden through the mild spring days, gossiping to her of all the great things that had befallen him, repeating to her, word for word, his conversation with the Prime Minister, and his interview with the Commander-in-Chief, or making her read all the letters of congratulation he had received, her mother’s heart thawed within her as it had not done for long.  Her ears told her that he was still vain and a boaster; her memory held the indelible records of his past selfishness; but as he walked beside her, his fair hair blown back from his handsome brow, and eyes that were so much younger than the rest of the face, his figure as spare and boyish now as when he had worn the colors of the Charterhouse eleven, she said to herself, in that inward and unsuspected colloquy she was always holding with her own heart about him, that if his father could have seen him now he would have forgiven him everything.  According to her secret Evangelical faith, God “deals” with every soul he has created—­through joy or sorrow, through good or evil fortune.  He had dealt with herself through anguish and loss.  Henry, it seemed, was to be moulded through prosperity.  His good fortune was already making a better man of him.