“To learn, mamma!” he said, with a singular flash of fire in his usual cool eye.  “To get rid of ignorance, and then to get the power that knowledge gives.  Rufus said the other day that knowledge is power, and I know he was right.  I feel like a man with his hands tied, because I am so ignorant.”

“You are hardly a man yet, Winthrop; you are only a boy in years.”

“I am almost sixteen, mother, and I haven’t taken the first step yet.”

What should the first step be?  A question in the minds of both; the answer —­ a blank.

“How long have you been thinking of this?”

“Since last spring, mother.”

“Didn’t Will’s going put it in your head?”

“That gave me the first thought; but it would have made no difference, mother; it would have come, sooner or later.  I know it would, by my feeling ever since.”

Mrs. Landholm’s eye wandered round the room, the very walls in their humbleness and roughness reminding her anew of the labour and self-denial it had cost to rear them, and then to furnish them, and that was now expended in keeping the inside warm.  Every brown beam and little window-sash could witness the story of privation and struggle, if she would let her mind go back to it; the associations were on every hand; neither was the struggle over.  She turned her back upon the room, and sitting down in Winthrop’s chair bent her look as he had done into the decaying bed of coals.

He was standing in the shadow of the mantelpiece, and looking down in his turn scanned her face and countenance as a little while before she had scanned his.  Hers was a fine face, in some of the finest indications.  It had not, probably it never had, the extreme physical beauty of her first-born, nor the mark of intellect that was upon the features of the second.  But there was the unmistakable writing of calm good sense, a patient and possessed mind, a strong power for the right, whether doing or suffering, a pure spirit; and that nameless beauty, earthly and unearthly, which looks out of the eyes of a mother; a beauty like which there is none.  But more; toil’s work, and care’s, were there, very plain, on the figure and on the face, and on the countenance too; he could not overlook it; work that years had not had time to do, nor sorrow permission.  His heart smote him.

“Mamma,” he said, “you have left out the hardest difficulty of all. —­ How can I go and leave you and papa without me?”

“How can you?  My child, I can bear to do without you in this world, if it is to be for your good or happiness.  There is only one thing, Winthrop, I cannot bear.”

He was silent.

“I could bear anything —­ it would make my life a garden of roses —­ if I were sure of having you with me in the next world.”

“Mamma —­ you know I would —­”

“I know you would, I believe, give your life to serve me, my boy.  But till you love God as well as that, —­ you may be my child, but you are not his.”