ant places of
memory, it had become at last one of the important milestones in her
experience. At the end, when she forgot everything else, she would not
forget Harry's foolish words, nor the look in his indignant boyish face
when he uttered them. Until then she had not admitted to herself that
there was a difference in her feeling for her children, but with the
touch of his sympathetic, not over clean, hand on her shoulder, she knew
that she should never again think of the three of them as if they were
one in her interest and her love. The girls were good children, dear
children--she would have let herself be cut in pieces for either of them
had it been necessary--but between Harry and herself there was a
different bond, a closer and a deeper dependency, which strengthened
almost insensibly as he grew older. Her daughters she loved, but her
son, as is the inexplicable way of women, she adored blindly and without
wisdom. If it had been possible to ruin him, she would have done so,
but, unlike many other sons, he seemed, by virtue of that invincible
strength with which he had been born, to be proof against both spoiling
and flattery. He was a nice boy even to strangers, even to Susan, with
her serene judgment of persons, he appeared a thoroughly nice boy! He
was not only a tall, lean, habitually towselled-headed youngster, with a
handsome sunburned face and a pair of charming, slightly quizzical blue
eyes, but he was, as his teachers and his school reports bore witness,
possessed of an intellectual brilliancy which made study as easy, and
quite as interesting to him, as play. Unlike his father, he had entered
life endowed with a cheerful outlook upon the world and with that
temperament of success which usually, but by no means inevitably,
accompanies it. Whatever happened, he would make the best of it, he
would "get on," and it was impossible to imagine him in any hole so deep
that he could not, sooner or later, find the way out of it. The
Pendleton and the Treadwell spirits had contributed their best to him.
If he derived from Cyrus, or from some obscure strain in Cyrus's
ancestry, a wholesome regard for material success, a robust
determination to achieve results combined with that hard, clear vision
of affairs which makes such achievement easy, he had inherited from
Gabriel his genial temper, his charm of manner, and his faith in life,
which, though it failed to move mountains, had sweetened and enriched
the mere act of