Has there not been some
misunderstanding--perhaps a quarrel--certainly a coldness between you?
A mother has a quick and a jealous eye; and I have seen, for some time,
that there is not the old confidence, the free natural manner, in
either of you, that there used to be, and which always gave your father
and me so much genuine happiness. Speak, then, and let me make peace
between you."

Robert Willoughby would not have looked at Maud, at that moment, to
have been given a regiment; as for Maud, herself, she was utterly
incapable of raising her eyes from the floor. The former coloured to
the temples, a proof of consciousness, his mother fancied; while the
latter's face resembled ivory, as much as flesh and blood.

"If you think, Robert," continued Mrs. Willoughby, "that Maud has
forgotten you, or shown pique for any little former misunderstanding,
during your last absence, you do her injustice. No one has done as much
for you, in the way of memorial; that beautiful sash being all her own
work, and made of materials purchased with her own pocket-money. Maud
loves you truly, too; for, whatever may be the airs she gives herself,
while you are together, when absent, no one seems to care more for your
wishes and happiness, than that very wilful and capricious girl."

"Mother!--mother!" murmured Maud, burying her face in both her hands.

Mrs. Willoughby was woman in all her feelings, habits and nature. No
one would have been more keenly alive to the peculiar sensibilities of
her sex, under ordinary circumstances, than herself; but she was now
acting and thinking altogether in her character of a mother; and so
long and intimately had she regarded the two beings before her, in that
common and sacred light, that it would have been like the dawn of a new
existence for her, just then, to look upon them as not really akin to
each other.

"I shall not, nor can I treat either of you as a child," she continued,
"and must therefore appeal only to your own good sense, to make a
peace. I know it can be nothing serious; but, it is painful to me to
see even an affected coldness among my children. Think, Maud, that we
are on the point of a war, and how bitterly you would regret it, should
any accident befall your brother, and your memory not be able to recall
the time passed among us, in his last visit, with entire satisfaction."

The mother's voice trembled; but tears no longer struggled about the
eyelids of Maud. Her face was pale as d