what I never expected, quite a student.
He employs all his spare time now in reading and studying;--the second
mate is a Frenchman, and James has got so that he can both speak and
read. He is studying Spanish, too."

Ever since the last conversation with her mother on the subject of
James, Mary had felt a sort of guilty constraint when any one spoke
of him;--instead of answering frankly, as she once did, when anything
brought his name up, she fell at once into a grave, embarrassed silence.

Mrs. Marvyn was so constantly thinking of him, that it was difficult to
begin on any topic that did not in some manner or other knit itself into
the one ever present in her thoughts. None of the peculiar developments
of the female nature have a more exquisite vitality than the sentiment
of a frail, delicate, repressed, timid woman for a strong, manly,
generous son. There is her ideal expressed; there is the out-speaking
and out-acting of all she trembles to think, yet burns to say or do;
here is the hero that shall speak for her, the heart into which she has
poured hers, and that shall give to her tremulous and hidden aspirations
a strong and victorious expression. "I have gotten a _man_ from the
Lord," she says to herself; and each outburst of his manliness, his
vigor, his self-confidence, his superb vitality, fills her with a
strange, wondering pleasure, and she has a secret tenderness and pride
even in his wilfulness and waywardness. "What a creature he is!" she
says, when he flouts at sober argument and pitches all received opinions
hither and thither in the wild capriciousness of youthful paradox. She
looks grave and reproving; but he reads the concealed triumph in her
eyes,--he knows that in her heart she is full of admiration all
the time. First love of womanhood is something wonderful and
mysterious,--but in this second love it rises again, idealized and
refined; she loves the father and herself united and made one in this
young heir of life and hope.

Such was Mrs. Marvyn's still intense, passionate love for her son. Not
a tone of his manly voice, not a flash of his dark eyes, not one of the
deep, shadowy dimples that came and went as he laughed, not a ring of
his glossy black hair, that was not studied, got by heart, and dwelt on
in the inner shrine of her thoughts; he was the romance of her life. His
strong, daring nature carried her with it beyond those narrow, daily
bounds where her soul was weary of treading; and jus