nything! Had it been a joke I could have managed to endure it,
or an accident about which she would have worried, I would have been
amused, but it was deliberate; and if it had been _clean_ water--but
ugh! it was greasy slop-water, to make it as bad as it could be; and
if a man had done it--"

The muscles of his arm expanded under my interested touch as he made a
fist of the strong brown hand.

"But being a girl I can only put up with it," he said with the
helplessness of the athlete in dealing with such a delinquent.

"Did you hear what she said too? Great Scott! it is not as though I
had done her any harm! I merely came here to see a friend, and made
myself agreeable because you said she was good to you; and, dear me!"
His voice broke with the fervour of his perturbation. He had been
wounded to the core of his manly _amour propre_; and to state that he
was not more than twenty-five, gives a better idea of his state of
mind than could any amount of laborious diagnosis.

"What can I have done?" he further ejaculated. "Can some one have told
her falsely that I'm a cad in any way? She might have waited until
she proved it. _I_ would not have believed bad any one spoken badly of
_her_." (Here an inadvertent confession of the growing affection he
felt for her.) "Even if I were deserving of such ignominy, it was none
of her business. I only came to see you,--she had nothing to do with
me."

Then I took hold of this splendidly muscular young creature wounded to
the quick. I determinedly usurped a mother's privilege in regard to
the situation, and glancing back over my barren life I would that I
had been mother of just such a son. What a kingdom 'twould have been;
and, in the order of things, being forced to surrender him to
another's keeping, I could not have chosen a better or more suitable
than Dawn. Entering his principality to reign as queen, while his
manhood was yet an unsacked stronghold, she was of the character and
determination to steer him in the way of uprightness to the end.

Wistfulness upsprung as I reviewed my empty life, but rude reality
suddenly uprose and obliterated ideality. It put on the scroll a
picture of motherhood, and mother-love wantonly squandered, trodden in
the mire, and, instead of being recognised as a kingdom, treated only
as a weakness, and traded upon to enslave women. I turned with a sigh,
and we walked round a corner of the garden where, in one recent
instance, appallingly common,