, when she was yet a young woman and he but a boy--thus, even as it
was now in the latter and the sadder time!

Mrs. Thorpe was long in regaining the self-possession which she had lost
on seeing her son for the first time since his flight from home. Zack
expressed his contrition over and over again, and many times reiterated
his promise to follow the plan Mr. Blyth had proposed to him when they
met at the turnpike, before his mother became calm enough to speak three
words together without bursting into tears. When she at last recovered
herself sufficiently to be able to address him with some composure, she
did not speak, as he had expected, of his past delinquencies or of his
future prospects, but of the lodging which he then inhabited, and of
the stranger whom he had suffered to become his friend. Although Mat's
gallant rescue of "Columbus" had warmly predisposed Valentine in
his favor, the painter was too conscientious to soften facts on that
account, when he told Zack's mother where her son was now living, and
what sort of companion he had chosen to lodge with. Mrs. Thorpe was
timid, and distrustful as all timid people are; and she now entreated
him with nervous eagerness to begin his promised reform by leaving Kirk
Street, and at once dropping his dangerous intimacy with the vagabond
stranger who lived there.

Zack defended his friend to his mother, exactly as he had already
defended him to Valentine--but without shaking her opinion, until he
bethought himself of promising that in this matter, as in all others,
he would be finally guided by the opinion of Mr. Blyth. The assurance
so given, accompanied as it was by the announcement that Valentine was
about to form his own judgment of Mr. Marksman by visiting the house in
Kirk Street that very night, seemed to quiet and satisfy Mrs. Thorpe.
Her last hopes for her son's future, now that she was forced to admit
the sad necessity of conniving at his continued absence from home,
rested one and all on Mr. Blyth alone.

This first difficulty smoothed over, Zack asked with no little
apprehension and anxiety, whether his father's anger showed any symptoms
of subsiding as yet. The question was an unfortunate one. Mrs. Thorpe's
eyes began to fill with tears again, the moment she heard it. The news
she had now to tell her son, in answering his inquiries, was of a very
melancholy and a very hopeless kind.

The attack of palpitations in the heart which had seized Mr. Thorpe on