These words he shouted out at the top of his voice, and in a few minutes his mother, Charles, and his sister Maria entered the room, the two latter in a state of transport.

“Here, Jenny, here he is; you have the first claim; confound it, Charley, Maria, don’t strangle the boy; ha, ha, ha!”

In fact, the precaution, so far as the affectionate brother and sister were concerned, was anything but needless.  His mother, seeing their eagerness to embrace him, which they did with tears of delight, stood calmly by until he was disentangled from their arms, when she approached him and imprinted two kisses upon his lips, with an indifference of manner that, to a stranger, would have been extraordinary, but which, to those who were present, excited no surprise; for she had scarcely, during her life, ever kissed one of her own children.  Nothing, indeed, could exceed the tumultuous exultation of spirits with which they received him, nor was honest Lindsay himself less joyously affected.  Yet it might be observed that there was a sparkle in the eye of his mother, which was as singular as it was concentrated and intense.  Such an expression might be observed in a menagerie when a tigress, indolently dallying with one of her cubs, exhibits, even in repose, those fiery scintillations in the eye which startle the beholders.  The light of that eye, though intense, was cold, calculating, and disagreeable to look upon.  The frigidity of her manner and reception of him might, to a certain extent, be accounted for from the fact that she had gone to his uncle’s several times for the purpose of seeing him, and watching his interests.  Let us not, therefore, impute to the coldness of her habits any want of affection for him; on the contrary, his little finger was a thousand times dearer to her than the bodies and souls of all her other children, adding to them her husband himself, put together.  Besides, she was perfectly unsusceptible of emotions of tenderness, and, consequently, a woman of powerful will, inflexible determination, and the most inexorable resentments.  She was also ambitious, as far as she had scope for it, within her sphere of life, and would have been painfully penurious in her family, were it not that the fiery resolution of her husband, when excited by long and intolerable provocation, was at all times able to subdue her—­a superiority over her will and authority which she never forgave him.  In fact, she neither loved himself, nor anything in common with him; and the natural affection which he displayed on the return of her son was one reason why she received him with such apparent indifference.  To all the rest of the family she had a heart of stone.  Since her second marriage they had lost three children; but, so far as she was concerned, each of them went down into a tearless grave.  She had once been handsome; but her beauty, like her son’s, was severe and disagreeable.  There is, however, such a class of beauty, and it is principally successful