ge-laden cab stops or a carriage unblessed with a groom pauses
before a shop.

Horace knew this hatred very well, so well that, although his nature was
as lavish as his mother's was mean, he seldom sought to rouse any pity
in her pitiless heart, or to strike the rock from which experience had
taught him that no water would gush out. Every habit of conduct, is,
however, broken through now and then, when the moment is exceptional and
the soul is deeply stirred. And this reticent mood of the boy when with
his mother one day received a shock which drove him into a contest with
her, and moved him to strive against the obedience which his love for
her habitually imposed upon him.

It was spring-time. Horace, now sixteen, and long established at Eton,
was at home for the Easter vacation, which he was spending with Mrs.
Errington, not at their country place, but in her town house in Park
Lane. One morning, when the City was smiling with sunshine, and was so
full of the breath of the sweet season that in quiet corners it seemed
in some strange and indefinite way almost Countrified, Horace went into
Mrs. Errington's boudoir and begged her to come out for a walk in the
Park, where he had already been bicycling before breakfast. When there
was no question of money she was always ready to accede to any request
of the boy's, and she got up at once from her writing-table--she was
just sending a short note of refusal to subscribe to some charity
pressed upon her attention by a hopeful clergyman--and went to her room
to put on her hat. Five minutes later she and Horace set forth.

Weather may have a softening or a hardening influence on the average
person. On Mrs. Errington it had neither. She felt much the same
essentially in a thunderstorm or in midsummer moonlight, on a black,
frost-bound winter's day, or on such a perfect and tender spring morning
as that on which she now passed through the park-gate with her son. She
never drew weather into her soul, but calmly recognised it as a fact
suitable for illustration on the first page of the Daily Graphic. Now
she walked gaily into the Row with Horace, looking about her for
acquaintances. She found some, and would not have been sorry to linger
with them. But Horace wanted her to go further afield, and accordingly
they soon moved on towards the Serpentine. It was when they were just in
sight of the water that they met Captain Hindford, already alluded to as
a man who had eventually more