That was all--the story of his thirty years of wild horseback life told in a few dry sentences! Could more have been expected! The mother had expected more and would not cease to expect it. He was her lost one found again, the child of her body who in his long absence had gotten a second nature; but it was nothing but a colour, a garment, which would wear thinner and thinner, and by-and-by reveal the old deeper ineradicable nature beneath. So she imagined, and would take him out to walk to be with him, to have him all to herself, to caress him, and they would walk, she with an arm round his neck or waist; and when she released him or whenever he could make his escape from the house, he would go off to the quarters of the hired cattlemen and converse with them. They were his people, and he was one of them in soul in spite of his blue eyes, and like one of them he could lasso or break a horse and throw a bull and put a brand on him, and kill a cow and skin it, or roast it in its hide if it was wanted so; and he could do a hundred other things, though he couldn't read a book, and I daresay he found it a very misery to sit on a chair in the company of those who read in books and spoke a language that was strange to him--the tongue he had himself spoken as a child! VII A THIRD STORY OF TWO BROTHERS Stories of two brothers are common enough the world over--probably more so than stories of young men who have fallen in love with their grandmothers, and the main feature in most of them, as in the story I have just told, is in the close resemblance of the two brothers, for on that everything hinges. It is precisely the same in the one I am about to relate, one I came upon a few years ago--just how many I wish not to say, nor just where it happened except that it was in the west country; and for the real names of people and places I have substituted fictitious ones. For this too, like the last, is a true story. The reader on finishing it will perhaps blush to think it true, but apart from the moral aspect of the case it is, psychologically, a singularly interesting one.