‘I fear it will never last,’ she would say to herself, watching him with prayer and trembling, as mothers do watch those sons who have a way of turning into something so different from what the maternal yearnings would shape them into if, along with the yearnings, the power existed of fulfilling them. ‘I fear it will never last. Contact with the world will harden him. Flattery will make him vain. Universal homage will spoil him.’ Mrs. Langstroth was a sweet and saintly lady, and her son Michael a brave and noble boy; but what insignificant hen-mother exists who does not think that the attention to herself and her matchless offspring must of necessity be universal? With pathetic, devoted blindness she would have prepared him to meet this irresistible tide of flattery and greatness by keeping him fast at her own side, and never loosing his leading strings. The mention of a public school drew tears from her eyes, and set her gentle heart beating wildly. It was written that her son Michael’s education—every branch of it—was to be taken out of her hands, and placed in others, firmer, harder, sterner, and to them who can survive their roughness, kinder hands than even those of a mother. Gilbert, Michael’s brother, was a well-grown boy, too, of ten, with a smaller, rounder head, a narrower forehead, and blue-gray eyes, which had a trick of languishing sometimes. He had an exquisitely soft and melancholy voice, was slow of speech, and possessed a graceful, though by no means effeminate figure. He was always, and apparently by nature, courteous and gentle in manner and speech, seldom indulging in the downright unflattering candour which Michael, for all he was so gentlemanly, frequently used towards his companions. Gilbert never said rude things to any one, but he was not so popular with his comrades as Michael.