“James, I promised our dead mother on her death-bed that I would try to be to you all that she was. She could do almost as she liked with you--could soften you and turn you from evil as no other person in the world could. There was some strange sympathy between you and her. Perhaps your knowledge of her one and only sin made you tender and chivalrous to her, just as it sometimes--God forgive me!--made me, who am so different from you and her, hard. And perhaps her memory of her one sinning made her gentle and tender to you in your many. I have had children of my own since then, James, and I think something has thawed in my heart that was cold as ice before. “I remember that in those childish days, when you would come to our mother after some wild and wicked deed, she would take you in her arms and speak softly to you, and that you would become another creature and would seek to undo the evil you had done. But I used to become impatient. I wished that you should be punished, and I remember that my words would turn you to stone again and bring that hard glitter that I so hated into your eyes. Yes, and when I saw her caressing you, whom I would have had flogged, I used to feel--though she was my mother as well as yours--as if I were a stranger in the house, and could not be of the same flesh and blood as you and she. “That is long ago, James, and we are no longer boy and girl, but man and woman. But my heart tells me that I have not kept my promise to her. She said to me when she was dying, ‘Mary, I am afraid for James. He can be chivalrously generous to those who appeal to his protection; he can be heartlessly cruel to those who oppose his will. You remember how as a boy he fought like a wild cat with two lads twice his size in defence of the homeless cur that crawled to his feet when they were stoning it; and you remember that upon the same day, because his own dog snarled at him, he beat it about the head so mercilessly that we had to kill it. Mary, I am afraid for James; I am the one and only soul in this world--where, young as he is, he feels himself an outcast--who understands him. And everything depends upon his associations. He might be a good man or he might be criminal. Mary, promise me you will not be too hard with him--promise me that you will try to understand him, and to make allowance, and to be gentle.’