her mother, and
her mother's father, had these qualities in the same combination.

When she took her children to pieces before their faces, she was
sharp and admonitory enough with them. She warned them to what their
characters would bring them to if they did not look out; but perhaps
because she beheld them so hopelessly the present effect of the
accumulated tendencies of the family past, she was tender and forgiving
to their actions. The mother came in there, and superseded the
student of heredity: she found excuse for them in the perversity of
circumstance, in the peculiar hardship of the case, in the malignant
misbehaviour of others.

As Dan entered, with the precedence his father and sister yielded him as
the principal actor in the scene which must follow, she lifted herself
vigorously in bed, and propped herself on the elbow of one arm while she
stretched the other towards him.

"I'm glad of it, Dan!" she called, at the moment he opened the door,
and as he came toward her she continued, with the amazing velocity of
utterance peculiar to nervous sufferers of her sex: "I know all about
it, and I don't blame you a bit! And I don't blame her! Poor helpless
young things! But it's a perfect mercy it's all over; it's the greatest
deliverance I ever heard of! You'd have been eaten up alive. I saw it,
and I knew it from the very first moment, and I've lived in fear and
trembling for you. You could have got on well enough if you'd been left
to yourselves, but that you couldn't have been nor hope to be as long as
you breathed, from the meddling and the machinations and the malice of
that unscrupulous and unconscionable old Cat!"

By the time Mrs. Mavering had hissed out the last word she had her arm
round her boy's neck and was clutching him, safe and sound after his
peril, to her breast; and between her kissing and crying she repeated
her accusals and denunciations with violent volubility.

Dan could not have replied to them in that effusion of gratitude and
tenderness he felt for his mother's partisanship; and when she went on
in almost the very terms of his self-defence, and told him that he had
done as he had because it was easy for him to yield, and he could not
imagine a Cat who would put her daughter up to entrapping him into a
promise that she knew must break his mother's heart, he found her so
right on the main point that he could not help some question of Mrs.
Pasmer in his soul. Could she really have been at