reparations of liquor, with which he would enhance the hilarity
of their expeditions; and finally worked on his love of adventure and
that impatient restlessness incident to his period of life to draw him
fully into his schemes. Moses lost all interest in his lessons, often
neglecting them for days at a time--accounting for his negligence by
excuses which were far from satisfactory. When Mara would expostulate
with him about this, he would break out upon her with a fierce
irritation. Was he always going to be tied to a girl's apron-string? He
was tired of study, and tired of old Sewell, whom he declared an old
granny in a white wig, who knew nothing of the world. He wasn't going to
college--it was altogether too slow for him--he was going to see life
and push ahead for himself.

Mara's life during this time was intensely wearing. A frail, slender,
delicate girl of thirteen, she carried a heart prematurely old with the
most distressing responsibility of mature life. Her love for Moses had
always had in it a large admixture of that maternal and care-taking
element which, in some shape or other, qualities the affection of woman
to man. Ever since that dream of babyhood, when the vision of a pale
mother had led the beautiful boy to her arms, Mara had accepted him as
something exclusively her own, with an intensity of ownership that
seemed almost to merge her personal identity with his. She felt, and
saw, and enjoyed, and suffered in him, and yet was conscious of a higher
nature in herself, by which unwillingly he was often judged and
condemned. His faults affected her with a kind of guilty pain, as if
they were her own; his sins were borne bleeding in her heart in silence,
and with a jealous watchfulness to hide them from every eye but hers.
She busied herself day and night interceding and making excuses for him,
first to her own sensitive moral nature, and then with everybody around,
for with one or another he was coming into constant collision. She felt
at this time a fearful load of suspicion, which she dared not express to
a human being.

Up to this period she had always been the only confidant of Moses, who
poured into her ear without reserve all the good and the evil of his
nature, and who loved her with all the intensity with which he was
capable of loving anything. Nothing so much shows what a human being is
in moral advancement as the quality of his love. Moses Pennel's love was
egotistic, exacting, tyrannical, an