forehead, and on his cheek--still pale with tears--a proud and contented
kiss, and sent him away comforted. Yet I saw him the next day laid on
the mound under which Yorke had been buried, his face covered with his
hands; he was melancholy for some weeks, and more than a year elapsed
before he would listen to any proposal of having another dog.

Victor learns fast. He must soon go to Eton, where, I suspect, his first
year or two will be utter wretchedness: to leave me, his mother, and his
home, will give his heart an agonized wrench; then, the fagging will not
suit him--but emulation, thirst after knowledge, the glory of success,
will stir and reward him in time. Meantime, I feel in myself a strong
repugnance to fix the hour which will uproot my sole olive branch, and
transplant it far from me; and, when I speak to Frances on the subject,
I am heard with a kind of patient pain, as though I alluded to some
fearful operation, at which her nature shudders, but from which her
fortitude will not permit her to recoil. The step must, however, be
taken, and it shall be; for, though Frances will not make a milksop of
her son, she will accustom him to a style of treatment, a forbearance,
a congenial tenderness, he will meet with from none else. She sees, as
I also see, a something in Victor's temper--a kind of electrical ardour
and power--which emits, now and then, ominous sparks; Hunsden calls it
his spirit, and says it should not be curbed. I call it the leaven of
the offending Adam, and consider that it should be, if not WHIPPED out
of him, at least soundly disciplined; and that he will be cheap of
any amount of either bodily or mental suffering which will ground him
radically in the art of self-control. Frances gives this something in
her son's marked character no name; but when it appears in the grinding
of his teeth, in the glittering of his eye, in the fierce revolt of
feeling against disappointment, mischance, sudden sorrow, or supposed
injustice, she folds him to her breast, or takes him to walk with her
alone in the wood; then she reasons with him like any philosopher, and
to reason Victor is ever accessible; then she looks at him with eyes of
love, and by love Victor can be infallibly subjugated; but will reason
or love be the weapons with which in future the world will meet his
violence? Oh, no! for that flash in his black eye--for that cloud on
his bony brow--for that compression of his statuesque lips, the lad will