“All right, mother,” replied Anderson.  He crossed the hall to his room lined with books, with the narrow couch.  It hardly seemed like a bedroom, and indeed he spent much of his time, when not at the store, there.  He resumed his seat in the well-worn easy-chair beside his hearth, upon which smouldered a fire, and waited.  He still felt dazed.  He had that doubt of his own identity which comes to us at times, and which is primeval under stress of a great surprise.  The old nursery rhyme of the old woman who had her petticoats clipped and was not sure of herself, has a truth in it which dates from the beginning of things.  Anderson, sitting precisely as he had been sitting before in the same chair by the same hearth—­he had even taken up the same book in which he had thought to read a chapter after his letters were finished, before retiring—­was as completely removed from his former state as if he had been translated into another planet.  He looked around the long room, which had a dark, rich coloring from the backs of old books, and some dark red hangings, and even that had a curious appearance of unsubstantiality to him.  Or was it substantiality.  Suddenly it seemed to him that heretofore he had seen it all through a glass, and now with his natural eyes.  He had attained a height a nature whence the prospect is untrammelled by imaginations and shows in the clear light of reality.  He thought of the girl whom his mother was coddling, tucking into bed as if she were a baby, and such a wave of tenderness and protection came over him that he felt newly vivified by it.  It was as if his very soul put forth arms and wings of love and defence.

“The dear little girl!” he thought to himself—­“the dear little girl!”

The thought that she was safe under his roof, away from all fancied and real terror, filled him with such a joy that he could scarcely contain it.  He imagined her nestling in that warm little bed out of his mother’s room, and the satisfaction that he might have felt had she been his child instead of his sweetheart, filled him with pure delight.  He tried to imagine her terrors, her young-girl terrors, alone in that house, her panic running alone through the night streets, and he even magnified it through inability to understand it.  He said to himself that she might have almost gone mad, and again that sublime joy, that immense sense of the protection and tenderness of love, filled his soul, which seemed to put forth wings.  Then the door opened and his mother entered softly, slipping through in her voluminous, purple-flowered draperies, with glimpses of white frills and large padding feet in purple-knitted slippers.  She still wore her frilled nightcap, and her face confronted him from the white setting with a curious severity.  Her hair was put up on crimping-pins, and her high forehead gave her a rather intellectual and stern appearance, and she looked much older.

Randolph rose.  “Sit down, mother,” he said.