the almost childish way in which he caught at her
sleeve, as she turned from him--ah, poor Guy!

"Edwin, is it my brother Edwin? Who would have thought it?"
Half-bewildered, he looked from one to the other of us all; but no one
spoke, no one contradicted him.

Edwin, his passion quite gone, stooped in a sorrowful and humble way to
pick up his betrothed's letter. Then Guy flew at him, and caught him
by the collar.

"You coward!--how dared you?--No, I won't hurt him; she is fond of him.
Go away, every one of you. Oh, mother, mother, mother!"

He fell on her neck, sobbing. She gathered him in her arms, as she had
used to do in his childhood; and so we left them.

"AS ONE WHOM HIS MOTHER COMFORTETH."

Ay, Prophet of Israel, thou wert wise.

CHAPTER XXXIV

John and I sat over the study fire till long after midnight.

Many an anxious watch I had kept with him, but none sadder than this.
Because now, for the first time, our house was divided against itself.
A sorrow had entered it, not from without but from within--a sorrow
which we could not meet and bear, as a family. Alas! darker and darker
had the bitter truth forced itself upon us, that neither joy nor
affliction would ever find us as a family again.

I think all parents must feel cruelly a pang like this--the first
trouble in which they cannot help their children--the first time when
those children must learn to stand alone, each for himself, compelled
to carry his own burthen and work out, well or ill, his individual
life. When the utmost the wisest or tenderest father can do, is to
keep near with outstretched hand that the child may cling to, assured
of finding sympathy, counsel, and love.

If this father had stood aloof all his life, on some pinnacle of
paternal "pride," paternal "dignity"--if he had not made himself his
boys' companion, counsellor, and friend, how great would have been his
terrors now!

For, as we both knew well--too well to trust ourselves to say it--if
there was one thing in the world that ruins a lad, drives him to
desperation, shuts the door of home upon him, and opens many another
door, of which the entrance is the very gate of hell--it is such a
disappointment as this which had happened to our Guy.

His father saw it all. Saw it clearer, crueller, than even his mother
could see. Yet when, very late, almost at dawn, she came in, with the
tidings that Guy was himself again now--sleeping as quietly as a
child--her husb