come back,
marry, and enjoy life."

"He does that now, I fancy."

"Looks so."

And indeed he did. There was not only vigor and manly beauty, splendid
in its present, but the "possibility of more to be in the full process
of his ripening days,"--a form alert and elegant, which had not yet all
of a man's muscle and strength; a face delicate, yet strong,--refined,
yet full of latent power; a mass of rippling hair like burnished gold,
flung back on the one side, sweeping low across brow and cheek on the
other; eyes

"Of a deep, soft, lucent hue,--
Eyes too expressive to be blue,
Too lovely to be gray."

People involuntarily thought of the pink and flower of chivalry as they
looked at him, or imagined, in some indistinct fashion, that they heard
the old songs of Percy and Douglas, or the later lays of the cavaliers,
as they heard his voice,--a voice that was just now humming one of these
same lays:--

"Then mounte! then mounte, brave gallants, all,
And don your helmes amaine;
Death's couriers, Fame and Honor, call
Us to the field againe."

"Stuff!" he cried impatiently, looking wistfully at the men's faces
going by,--"stuff! _We_ look like gallants to ride a tilt at the world,
and die for Honor and Fame,--we!"

"I thank God, Willie, you are not called upon for any such sacrifice."

"Ah, little mother, well you may!" he answered, smiling, and taking her
hand,--"well you may, for I am afraid I should fall dreadfully short
when the time came; and then how ashamed you'd be of your big boy, who
took his ease at home, with the great drums beating and the trumpets
blowing outside. And yet--I should like to be tried!"

"See, mother!" he broke out again,--"see what a life it is, getting and
spending, living handsomely and doing the proper thing towards society,
and all that,--rubbing through the world in the old hereditary way;
though I needn't growl at it, for I enjoy it enough, and find it a
pleasant enough way, Heaven knows. Lazy idler! enjoying the sunshine
with the rest. Heigh-ho!"

"You have your profession, Willie. There's work there, and opportunity
sufficient to help others and do for yourself."

"Ay, and I'll _do_ it! But there is so much that is poor and mean, and
base and tricky, in it all,--so much to disgust and tire one,--all the
time, day after day, for years. Now if it were only a huge giant that
stands in your way, you could out rapier and have at him at once, and
there an e