“They have taken him away,” she said briefly, without looking up.  “Please care for his horse and accept my thanks,” and then she hastened to her room and did not appear again that day.

He complied with her request, then went back to his work, and the grain fell as if the reaper were Death himself.

Mrs. Arnold’s course was not so harsh and rude as it seemed, and can readily be explained on the theory by which she governed her feelings and actions toward her son.  An obscure weakness in the functions of his heart had rendered him subject to fainting turns from early childhood.  Physicians had always cautioned against over-exertion and over-excitement of any kind; therefore he had not been sent to school like the other children, or permitted to indulge in the sports natural to his age.  Having been constantly cautioned, curbed, and repressed, he grew into a timid, self-distrustful, irresolute man, and yet was keenly sensible of the defects that separated him from other men.  No one ever longed for independence more earnestly than he; few were less able to achieve it.  His mother, having shielded him so many years from himself as well as from adverse influences from without, had formed the habit of surveillance.  Exaggerating his weakness and dependence, his unfitness to compete with other men in active pursuits, she had almost ignored his manhood.  The rest of the family naturally took their tone from her, regarding him as an invalid, and treating him as one.  Chafing with secret and increasing bitterness over his misfortune and anomalous position, he grew more and more silent and reserved, dwelling apart in a world created from a literature that was not of the best or most wholesome character.  As long as he lived a quiet, monotonous life that accorded with the caution enjoined by physicians, he gave his mother little solicitude, for the woman of the world, versed in all the proprieties of her station, had no comprehension of the sensitive spirit that had been repressed equally with his physical nature.  That he should become cold toward her, and cynical toward her world of wealth and fashion, was to her but a proof that his character was defective also, and led to the fear that his “absurd notions” might occasion trouble.  His intimacy with the Jocelyns threatened to justify her forebodings, and, while knowing nothing of Mildred personally, she was naturally inclined to the belief that she, like many others, would be glad to escape poverty by allying herself to an old and wealthy family, and she regarded her son as weak enough to become a ready victim.  Nevertheless he was of age, and if he should enter into a formal engagement it might be no easy matter to break it or escape the consequences.  Therefore she determined at all hazards to prevent such a consummation, and thus far had succeeded.  She was greatly angered that, in spite of her precautions and injunctions, he had again met Mildred, and she resolved to end the interview at once, even at the cost of being thought