ct my solicitor to take the right steps to do so. I will see that
she is safe from the ills you feel for her. Lionel, more still, I am
impatient till I write to Mrs. Haughton. I did her wrong. Remember, I
have never seen her. I resented in her the cause of my quarrel with your
father, who was once dear to me. Enough of that. I disliked the tone of
her letters to me. I disliked it in the mother of a boy who had Darrell
blood; other reasons too,--let them pass. But in providing for your
education; I certainly thought her relations provided for her support.
She never asked me for help there; and, judging of her hastily, I
thought she would not have scrupled to do so, if my help there had not
been forestalled. You have made me understand her better; and, at all
events, three-fourths of what we are in boyhood most of us owe to our
mothers! You are frank, fearless, affectionate, a gentleman. I respect
the mother who has such a son."

Certainly praise was rare upon Darrell's lips; but when he did praise,
he knew how to do it! And no man will ever command others who has not
by nature that gift! It cannot be learned. Art and experience can only
refine its expression.

CHAPTER XIII.

He who sees his heir in his own child, carries his eye over hopes and
possessions lying far beyond his gravestone, viewing his life, even
here, as a period but closed with a comma. He who sees his heir in
another man's child, sees the full stop at the end of the sentence.

Lionel's departure was indefinitely postponed; nothing more was said of
it. Meanwhile Darrell's manner towards him underwent a marked change.
The previous indifference the rich kinsman had hitherto shown as to the
boy's past life, and the peculiarities of his intellect and character,
wholly vanished. He sought now, on the contrary, to plumb thoroughly the
more hidden depths which lurk in the nature of every human being, and
which, in Lionel, were the more difficult to discern from the vivacity
and candour which covered with so smooth and charming a surface a pride
tremulously sensitive, and an ambition that startled himself in the
hours when solitude and revery reflect upon the visions of youth the
giant outline of its own hopes.

Darrell was not dissatisfied with the results of his survey; yet often,
when perhaps most pleased, a shade would pass over his countenance; and
had a woman who loved him been by to listen, she would have heard the
short slight sigh which came a