ds. They
had been chosen out of deference to his boyish appetite. He never
tasted them again, if he could help it. They seemed to have added to
their already strange assortment of flavours a tang of bitterness that
bore the seeds of spiritual indigestion.

His mother looked up to greet him with an eagerness from which she
vainly sought to banish pride. He was her only child, her all; and he
was sufficiently good to look upon, clever enough to pass muster in a
crowd. To her adoring eyes, however, he was a mingling of an Adonis
with a Socrates. And she herself, by encouragement and admonition and
self-denying toil, had helped to make him what he was. Small wonder
that her pride in him could never be completely downed! Nevertheless,--

"Have a good time, last night?" she asked him tamely.

But she missed a certain young enthusiasm from his accent, as he
answered,--

"Fine!"

"Catie there?" she asked again, with the crisp elision of one whose
life has been too strenuous to waste itself in the more leisurely forms
of speech.

"Yes. Is breakfast ready?"

She nodded, as she speared the sizzling sausages one by one and
transferred them to a platter. Then, while she poured off a little of
the fat by way of gravy, she put yet another question.

"Look pretty?" she said.

Her son felt no difficulty in applying the question to Catie, the
proper object, rather than to the sausages on which his mother's gaze
was bent.

"About as usual," he said temperately.

His mother laughed out suddenly. The laugh brought back to her face a
faint resemblance to the girl who, as the pretty daughter of old Parson
Wheeler, had been the acknowledged belle of all the small community.
Later on, all the small community had been jarred to its social
foundations by the discovery that Betty Wheeler, child of a long, long
line of parsons, was going to marry Birge Brenton who had come to
"clerk it" in the village store. She did marry him, and, a little later
on, and most obligingly for all concerned, he died. Few people mourned
him. His wife, though, was among the few. She had a conscience of
Puritan extraction, and the keenest possible sense of what was seemly.

Scott, at the time, was ten days old; therefore he did not share her
mourning. Indeed, he was too busy trying to adjust himself to things in
general and pins in particular to have much energy or time left over to
spare for thinking about other people. Already, the trail of Mrs.
Brento