It is late afternoon when you come in sight of the tall sycamores that shade your home; you shudder now, lest you may meet any whom you once knew.  The first keen grief of youth seeks little of the sympathy of companions:  it lies—­with a sensitive man—­bounded within the narrowest circles of the heart.  They only who hold the key to its innermost recesses can speak consolation.  Years will make a change;—­as the Summer grows in fierce heats, the balminess of the violet banks of Spring is lost in the odors of a thousand flowers;—­the heart, as it gains in age, loses freshness, but wins breadth.

——­Throw a pebble into the brook at its source, and the agitation is terrible, and the ripples chafe madly their narrowed banks;—­throw in a pebble when the brook has become a river, and you see a few circles, widening and widening and widening, until they are lost in the gentle every-day murmur of its life!

You draw your hat over your eyes, as you walk toward the familiar door:  the yard is silent; the night is falling gloomily; a few katydids are crying in the trees.  The mother’s window, where at such a season as this it was her custom to sit watching your play, is shut, and the blinds are closed over it.  The honeysuckle, which grew over the window, and which she loved so much, has flung out its branches carelessly; and the spiders have hung their foul nets upon its tendrils.

And she, who made that home so dear to your boyhood, so real to your after-years,—­standing amid all the flights of your youthful ambition, and your paltry cares (for they seem paltry now), and your doubts, and anxieties and weaknesses of heart, like the light of your hope—­burning ever there under the shadow of the sycamores,—­a holy beacon, by whose guidance you always came to a sweet haven, and to a refuge from all your toils,—­is gone, gone forever!

The father is there indeed,—­beloved, respected, esteemed; but the boyish heart, whose old life is now reviving, leans more readily and more kindly into that void where once beat the heart of a mother.

Nelly is there,—­cherished now with all the added love that is stricken off from her who has left you forever.  Nelly meets you at the door.

——­“Clarence!”

——­“Nelly!”

There are no other words; but you feel her tears as the kiss of welcome is given.  With your hand joined in hers, you walk down the hall into the old, familiar room,—­not with the jaunty college step,—­not with any presumption on your dawning manhood,—­oh, no,—­nothing of this!

Quietly, meekly, feeling your whole heart shattered, and your mind feeble as a boy’s, and your purposes nothing, and worse than nothing,—­with only one proud feeling you fling your arm around the form of that gentle sister,—­the pride of a protector,—­the feeling—­“I will care for you now, dear Nelly!”—­that is all.  And even that, proud as it is, brings weakness.

You sit down together upon the lounge; Nelly buries her face in her hands, sobbing.