“You are a very wise young man.”

Warrington laughed embarrassedly.  “I have had to figure out all these things.”

“But if she does not love him!”

“How in the world can she help it?”

She caught up his hand in a motherly clasp.

“We mothers are vain in our love.  We make our sons paragons; we blind ourselves to their faults; we overlook their follies, and condone their sins.  And we build so many castles that one day tumble down about our ears.  Why is it a mother always wishes her boy to marry the woman of her choice?  What right has a mother to interfere with her son’s heart-desires?  It may be that we fear the stranger will stand between us.  A mother holds, and always will hold, that no woman on earth is good enough for her son.  Now, as I recollect, I did not think Mr. Bennington too good for me.”  She smiled drolly.

Lucky Jack!  If only he had had a mother like this!  Warrington thought.

“I dare say he thought that, too,” he said.  “Myself, I never knew a mother’s love.  No doubt I should have been a better man.  Yet, I’ve often observed that a boy with a loving mother takes her love as a matter of course, and never realizes his riches till he has lost them.  My aunt is the only mother I have known.”

“And a dear, kind, loving soul she is,” said Mrs. Bennington.  “She loves you, if not with mother-love, at least with mother-instinct.  When we two get together, we have a time of it; I, lauding my boy; she, praising hers.  But I go round and round in a circle:  my boy.  Sons never grow up, they are always our babies; they come to us with their heartaches, at three or at thirty; there is ever one door open in the storm, the mother’s heart.  If she loves my boy, nothing shall be too good for her.”

“I feel reasonably sure that she does.”  Did she? he wondered.  Did she love Jack as he (Warrington) wanted some day to be loved?

“As you say,” the mother went on, “how can she help loving him?  He is a handsome boy; and this alone is enough to attract women.  But he is so kind and gentle, Richard; so manly and strong.  He has his faults; he is human, like his mother.  John is terribly strong-willed, and this would worry me, were I not sure that his sense of justice is equally strong.  He is like me in gentleness; but the man in him is the same man I loved in my girlhood days.  When John maps out a course to act upon, if he believes he is right, nothing can swerve him—­nothing.  And sometimes he has been innocently wrong.  I told Miss Challoner all his good qualities and his bad.  She told me that she, too, has her faults.  She added that there was only one other man who could in any manner compare with John, and that man is you.”

“I?” his face growing warm.

“Yes.  But she had no right to compare anybody with my boy,” laughing.

“There isn’t any comparison whatever,” admitted Warrington, laughing too.  “But it was very kind of Miss Challoner to say a good word for me.”  And then upon impulse he related how, and under what circumstances, he had first met the actress.