“Sometimes —­ I am afraid,” he said with a smile.

“I suppose your greater power of nerve and of guarding appearances, is one secret of the triumphant sort of pride you wear upon occasion.  There —­I see it in your face now.”

“I hope not,” said Winthrop laughing.  “The best instance of self-control that I ever saw, was most unaccompanied with any arrogance of merit or power.”

“He means his mother again,” thought Elizabeth.

“Was that instance in a man or a woman, Mr. Landholm?”

“It was in a woman —­ unfortunately for your ground.”

“Not at all,” said Elizabeth.  “Exceptions prove nothing.”

Winthrop said nothing, for his thoughts were busy with that image of sweet self-guidance which he had never known to be unsteady or fail; and which, he knew, referred all its strength and all its stableness to the keeping of another hand.  Most feminine, most humble, and most sure.

“Mr. Winthrop, your mother puzzles me,” said Elizabeth.  “I wish I knew some of her secrets.”

“I wish I did,” he answered with half a sigh.

“Why, don’t you!”

“No.”

“I thought you did.”

“No; for she says they can only be arrived at through a certain initiation which I have not had —­ after certain preliminary steps, which I have not yet taken.”

Elizabeth looked at him, both surprised and curious.

“What are they?”

Winthrop’s face was graver than usual, as he said,

“I wish my mother were here to answer you.”

“Why, cannot you?”

“No.”

“Don’t you know the preliminary steps, Mr. Landholm?”

He looked very grave again.

“Not clearly enough to tell you.  In general, I know she would say there is a narrow way to be passed through before the treasures of truth, or its fair prospects, can be arrived at; but I have never gone that way myself and I cannot point out the way-marks.”

“Are you referring to the narrow gate spoken of in the Bible?”

“To the same.”

“Then you are getting upon what I do not understand,” said Elizabeth.

They had mounted the steps of No. 11, and were waiting for the door to be opened.  They waited silently till it was done, and then parted with only a ‘good night.’  Elizabeth did not ask him in, and it hardly occurred to Winthrop to wonder that she did not.

Mr. Landholm read no classics that night.  Neither law.  Neither, which may seem more strange, did he consult his Book of books at all.  He busied himself, not exactly with the study of the human mind, but of two human minds, —­ which, though at first sight it may seem an enlargement of the subject, is in fact rather a contracted view of the same.

CHAPTER XXII.

Sir Toby.  Do not our lives consist of the four elements? Sir And. ’Faith, so they say, but, I think, it rather consists of eating and drinking.  TWELFTH NIGHT.