’I said nothing of what was at stake, though I knew.  Mr. Mutimer was perfectly open with me.  “I have trusted him implicitly,” he said, “because I believe him as staunch and true as his brother.  I make no allowances for what are called young man’s follies:  he must be above anything of that kind.  If he is not—­well, I have been mistaken in him, and I can’t deal with him as I wish to do.”  You know what he was, Hubert, and you can imagine him speaking those words.  We waited.  The bad news was confirmed, and from you there came nothing.  I would not hint at the loss you were incurring; of my own purpose I should have refrained from doing so, and Mr. Mutimer forbade me to appeal to anything but your better self.  If you would not come to me because I wished it, I could not involve you and myself in shame by seeing you yield to sordid motives.’

Hubert raised his head.  A choking voice kept him silent for a moment only.

’Mother, the loss is nothing to you; you are above regrets of that kind; and for myself, I am almost glad to have lost it.’

‘In very truth,’ answered the mother, ’I care little about the wealth you might have possessed.  What I do care for is the loss of all the hopes I had built upon you.  I thought you honour itself; I thought you high-minded.  Young as you are, I let you go from me without a fear.  Hubert, I would have staked my life that no shadow of disgrace would ever fall upon your head!  You have taken from me the last comfort of my age.’

He uttered words she could not catch.

‘The purity of your soul was precious to me,’ she continued, her accents struggling against weakness; ’I thought I had seen in you a love of that chastity without which a man is nothing; and I ever did my best to keep your eyes upon a noble ideal of womanhood.  You have fallen.  The simpler duty, the point of every-day honour, I could not suppose that you would fail in.  From the day when you came of age, when Mr. Mutimer spoke to you, saying that in every respect you would be as his son, and you, for your part, accepted what he offered, you owed it to him to respect the lightest of his reasonable wishes.  The wish which was supreme in him you have utterly disregarded.  Is it that you failed to understand him?  I have thought of late of a way you had now and then when you spoke to me about him; it has occurred to me that perhaps you did him less than justice.  Regard his position and mine, and tell me whether you think he could have become so much to us if he had not been a gentleman in the highest sense of the word.  When Godfrey first of all brought me that proposal from him that we should still remain in this house, it seemed to me the most impossible thing.  You know what it was that induced me to assent, and what led to his becoming so intimate with us.  Since then it has been hard for me to remember that he was not one of our family.  His weak points it was not difficult to discover; but I fear you did not understand what was noblest in his character.  Uprightness, clean-heartedness, good faith—­these things he prized before everything.  In you, in one of your birth, he looked to find them in perfection.  Hubert, I stood shamed before him.’