ook him off his guard, and in
spite of the grimmest endeavor to prevent it, his smile increased and he
stopped to keep from laughing.

Mrs. March rose, eloquent with unspoken resentment, and started from the
room. At the door she cast back the blush of a martyr's forgiveness, and
the next instant was in her son's big right arm. His words were broken
with laughter.

"My dear, pretty little mother!" She struggled alarmedly, but he held
her fast. "Why, I know the day is nothing to you, dear, less than
nothing. I know perfectly well that I am your own and only valentine.
Ain't I? Because you're mine now, you know, since I've turned over this
new leaf."

The mother averted her face. "O my son, I'm so unused to loving words,
they only frighten me."

But John spoke on with deepening emotion. "Yes, mother, I'm going to be
your valentine, and yours only, as I've never been or thought of being
in all my life before. I'm going to try my very best! You'll help me,
won't you, little valentine mother?"

She lifted a glance of mournful derision. "Valentine me no valentines.
You but increase my heart-loneliness. Ah! my self-deluded boy, your
fickle pledges only mean, to my sad experience, that you have made your
own will everything, and my wish nothing. Valentine me no valentines,
let me go."

The young man turned abruptly and strode back to his newspapers. But he
was too full of bitterness to read. He heard his mother's soft progress
upstairs, and her slow step in the unlighted room overhead. It ceased.
She must have sat down in the dark. A few moments passed. Then it
sounded again, but so strange and hurried that he started up, and as he
did so the cry came, frantic with alarm, from the upper hall, and then
from the head of the stairs:

"John! John!"

He was already bounding up them. Mrs. March stood at the top, pale and
trembling. "A man!" she cried, "with a gun! I saw him down in the
moonlight under my window! I saw him! he's got a gun!"

She was deaf and blind to her son's beseechings to be quiet. He caught
her hands in his; they were icy. He led her by gentle force down-stairs
and back to her sitting-room seat.

"Why, that's all right, mother; that's what you made me put the shutters
on down here for. If you'd just come and told me quietly, why, I might
a' got him from your window. Did you see him?"

"I don't know," she moaned. "He had a gun. I saw one end of it."

"Are you sure it was a gun? Which end did you see