Now inasmuch as the thing befell according to my prediction, what need for me to dwell upon it, after saying how it would be?  Moreover, I would regret to write down what mother said about Lorna, in her first surprise and tribulation; not only because I was grieved by the gross injustice of it, and frightened mother with her own words (repeated deeply after her); but rather because it is not well, when people repent of hasty speech, to enter it against them.

That is said to be the angels’ business; and I doubt if they can attend to it much, without doing injury to themselves.

However, by the afternoon, when the sun began to go down upon us, our mother sat on the garden bench, with her head on my great otter-skin waistcoat (which was waterproof), and her right arm round our Annie’s waist, and scarcely knowing which of us she ought to make the most of, or which deserved most pity.  Not that she had forgiven yet the rivals to her love—­Tom Faggus, I mean, and Lorna—­but that she was beginning to think a tattle better of them now, and a vast deal better of her own children.

And it helped her much in this regard, that she was not thinking half so well as usual of herself, or rather of her own judgment; for in good truth she had no self, only as it came home to her, by no very distant road, but by way of her children.  A better mother never lived; and can I, after searching all things, add another word to that?

And indeed poor Lizzie was not so very bad; but behaved (on the whole) very well for her.  She was much to be pitied, poor thing, and great allowances made for her, as belonging to a well-grown family, and a very comely one; and feeling her own shortcomings.  This made her leap to the other extreme, and reassert herself too much, endeavouring to exalt the mind at the expense of the body; because she had the invisible one (so far as can be decided) in better share than the visible.  Not but what she had her points, and very comely points of body; lovely eyes to wit, and very beautiful hands and feet (almost as good as Lorna’s), and a neck as white as snow; but Lizzie was not gifted with our gait and port, and bounding health.

Now, while we sat on the garden bench, under the great ash-tree, we left dear mother to take her own way, and talk at her own pleasure.  Children almost always are more wide-awake than their parents.  The fathers and the mothers laugh; but the young ones have the best of them.  And now both Annie knew, and I, that we had gotten the best of mother; and therefore we let her lay down the law, as if we had been two dollies.

[Illustration:  290.jpg Gotten the best of mother]

“Darling John,” my mother said, “your case is a very hard one.  A young and very romantic girl—­God send that I be right in my charitable view of her—­has met an equally simple boy, among great dangers and difficulties, from which my son has saved her, at the risk of his life at every step.  Of course, she became attached to him, and looked up to him in every way, as a superior being”—­