t to her, and had clung to her with overflowing love and
confidence. Without many words, he had understood that she was to be
his protectress.

It was a task she did not find easy always, especially as opposed to
her own sister. But the compensation was a thousandfold, in her
tenderness for the child, in whom his early hardships appeared to have
blighted all the gaiety and elasticity of his age; and now under her
genial influence, she saw these expand, brighter and more spontaneous,
from year to year.

And she knew that he owed her more than this mere deliverance from
bodily durance. She had been as indefatigable in the tending of his
mind; in helping him to complete in private, the defective education of
the common school which he attended daily. In this, she had no small
opposition to suffer from her pupil and his artistic tastes; not to
speak of her own inclination to do his bidding, instead of enforcing
hers. Far pleasanter she would have found it, to sit working by his
side, listening to his good-humoured rattle, while he was busy over
some architectural drawing; than to tie him down to the thread of a
weary lesson-book, that was to drag him through some dry essentials of
education. But in all things she had taught herself to consider, first
of all, his real wants and future welfare. She had never trifled with
her maternal duties, nor been childish with her child.

Was it strange that, in time, the course of all her plans and wishes
fell into this single channel? that, waking or sleeping, he was ever
before her eyes? that these followed him, unconsciously, in all his
movements when he was present; and, when absent, that she looked as
constantly towards the door, and listened to nothing so interesting as
his returning step?

And now when she mentally compared him with, all the other men she had
known in all these years, was she not justified in believing that she
could do without any and all of these, if only he remained to her? And
there was no weak idolatry in this; she had never deceived herself. She
saw that he was neither handsome, nor graceful, not even of very
engaging manners; she often teased him about his awkward ways
and helpless movements, and his duncolored shock of hair; she
acknowledged that his features were commonplace; that his figure was a
clothes-stick, for all the tailor's pains to make a man of him. Yet
there was a charm about him, that even strangers and coarser natures,
she observed, sel