e organizations,
lay beneath the daily current of his life, like golden veins in the bed
of a stream, shining through the crystal waters that bore the most
commonplace objects on their tide. He thoroughly accepted that
interpretation of the Ideal which calls it a "divine halo with which the
Creator had encircled the world of reality;" but while he instinctively
lifted all he loved into supernal regions and contemplated them in the
glorious spirit-light that heightens all beauty, he lost sight of none
of the stern actualities of their existence. His imagination had
fashioned a hero out of Maurice, and he had thrown his person in heroic
guise upon canvas; yet he clearly beheld and mourned over the morbid
tendency that was weakening his mind and threatened to render his
character and his life equally unheroic.

Only a few days after the conversation we have just narrated, when
Maurice entered Ronald's sitting-room he found the student with an open
letter in his hand. As he lifted his eloquent, brown eyes from the paper
a glittering moisture beaded their darkly fringed lashes, and an
expression of ineffable tenderness looked out from their lustrous
depths. The letter was from his mother,--one of those messengers of deep
affection which transported him into her presence, placed him, as he had
so often sat in his petted boyhood, at her feet, to listen to her holy
teachings, and be thrilled to the very centre of his being by her words
of love. During his three years of separation, at a period when the
expanding mind is most impressible, these letters, weekly received, had
surrounded him with a heavenly aura which seemed breathed out through a
mother's ceaseless prayers, and had kept his life pure, his spirit
strong, his heart uplifted; had preserved him from being hurried by the
wild, ungoverned impulses of youth, rendered more infectuous by the
volcanic fires of genius, into actions for which he might blush
hereafter.

It was one of the undefined, unspoken sources of sympathy between Ronald
and Maurice, that the guarding hand of _woman_, influencing them from a
distance, preserved the bloom, the freshness, the pristine purity of
both their souls, even in the polluted atmosphere of a city where
immorality is an accepted evil. Maurice, who had never known a mother's
hallowing affection, gained his strength through his early attachment to
a maiden whom no man could love without being ennobled thereby; and
Ronald, whose heart h