I have never been able to procure the book or pamphlet, but I know she was the best of mothers, and of wives too.  And she, with her old husband, growing like a rose out of a weather-beaten rock, proved she was that, among those handsome foreign officers poorly remarkable for their morals.  Not once had the Old Buccaneer to teach them a lesson.  Think of it and you will know that her feet did not stray—­nor did her pretty eyes.  Her heart was too full for the cravings of vanity.  Innocent ladies who get their husbands into scrapes are innocent, perhaps; but knock you next door in their bosoms, where the soul resides, and ask for information of how innocence and uncleanness may go together.  Kirby purchased a mine in Carinthia, on the borders of Styria, and worked it himself.  His native land displeased him, so that he would not have been unwilling to see Chillon enter the Austrian service, which the young man was inclined for, subsequent to his return to his parents from one of the English public schools, notwithstanding his passionate love for Old England.  But Lord Levellier explained the mystery in a letter to his half-forgiven sister, praising the boy for his defence of his mother’s name at the school, where a big brutal fellow sneered at her, and Chillon challenged him to sword or pistol; and then he walked down to the boy’s home in Staffordshire to force him to fight; and the father of the boy made him offer an apology.  That was not much balm to Master Chillon’s wound.  He returned to his mother quite heavy, unlike a young man; and the unhappy lady, though she knew, him to be bitterly sensitive on the point of honour, and especially as to everything relating to her, saw herself compelled to tell him the history of her life, to save him, as she thought, from these chivalrous vindications of her good name.  She may have even painted herself worse than she was, both to excuse her brother’s miserliness to her son and the world’s evil speaking of her.  Wisely or not, she chose this course devotedly to protect him from the perils she foresaw in connection with the name of the once famous Countess Fanny in the British Isles.  And thus are we stricken by the days of our youth.  It is impossible to moralize conveniently when one is being hurried by a person at one’s elbow.

So the young man heard his mother out and kissed her, and then he went secretly to Vienna and enlisted and served for a year as a private in the regiment of Hussars, called, my papers tell me, Liechtenstein, and what with his good conduct and the help of Kirby’s friends, he would have obtained a commission from the emperor, when, at the right moment to keep a sprig of Kirby’s growth for his country, Lord Levellier sent word that he was down for a cornetcy in a British regiment of dragoons.  Chillon came home from a garrison town, and there was a consultation about his future career.  Shall it be England?  Shall it be Austria?  Countess Fanny’s voice was for England, and she carried the vote, knowing though she did that it signified separation, and it might be alienation—­where her son would chance to hear things he could not refute.  She believed that her son by such a man as Kirby would be of use to his country, and her voice, against herself, was for England.