ted to you, an internal prescience whispered that
you had within you the very qualities which are asserting their
existence to-day."

"They might have been _in_ me, Ronald," answered Maurice with emotion;
"but I fear they would never have been brought _out_ but for your
agency. I never can be grateful enough that we have been thrown
together! I never can sum up the good you have done me! I stood in such
great need of just the influence you and your mother"--The voice of
Maurice trembled, and he was unable to proceed.

Ronald broke the somewhat embarrassing silence by saying,--

"In short, you have come to the conclusion that my mother is right in
her faith, and whatever we actually need for our spiritual advancement
is invariably sent, if we will but preserve ourselves in a state of
reception. All that you still lack will be supplied in the same way, if
you can but believe."

"_I do believe_," answered Maurice, in a tone of greater solemnity than
the occasion seemed to demand; but there was a world of meaning in those
three words. We should be obliged to employ many if we attempted to
express a tithe of what he had recently learned to _believe_ through
the instrumentality of a noble thinker.

A week later, Ronald folded his mother to his throbbing heart, and
tenderly bade her adieu; but, without feeling that he should be parted
from her by their material separation. Strange to say, his farewell to
his father and Maurice was shadowed by a nearer approach to sadness and
a more definite sense of sundering. Possibly their spirits had less
power than his mother's to annihilate space and follow him whithersoever
he went.

Maurice was induced to linger a few days longer as the guest of his new
friends, and his presence prevented the void left by the departure of a
beloved and only son from being too keenly felt. At the commencement of
a new week the young viscount removed to Charleston. That city was only
a few miles distant from the residence of Ronald's parents. Mr. Walton
had made his visitor acquainted with an eminent lawyer, who consented to
receive Maurice de Gramont as a student.

Count Tristan at first violently opposed his son's step, but he could
not, with any show of reason, forbid his studying law as a _pastime_.
The count's affairs became more and more entangled, and he grew more
desirous than ever that his son should contract a wealthy marriage. The
hope that Maurice might woo and win one of those numerou