His love for his mother had been the ruling passion of his life. She was at rest now, and he could face the future calmly. He could go forth to meet his destiny with a spirit at once superior to hope and fear. It was for _her_ he had hoped; it was for her he had feared. He stood alone now; his breast was no longer a rampart to shield her from “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” The arrows might come thick and fast now; they could only wound him; and he already had suffered the deepest wound that evil fortune could inflict upon him. He had lost _her_. The bitterest sting of all lay in the knowledge that she had never been happy. Her son had loved her with unspeakable tenderness. He had protected her and worked for her, and admired and adored her; but he had never been able to make her happy. That gentle, womanly heart had been too deeply wounded in the past. Eustace Thorburn had known this; and knowing this had been patient, because he would not trouble her mild spirit by any show of impatience. He had known that she had been wronged, and yet had never asked her the name of the wrong-doer. He, her natural champion and avenger, had never sought for vengeance upon the man whose treachery or unkindness had blighted her life. He had held his peace, because to question her would have been to pain her; and how could he give her pain? So he had been patient, in spite of a passionate desire for ever smouldering in his heart--the desire to avenge his mother’s wrongs. She was at rest; and the time for vengeance had arrived. The same fatal influence which had destroyed her happiness had shortened her life. In the prime of womanhood, before a wrinkle had lined her forehead, or a silver thread appeared amidst her soft brown hair, she had gone to her grave, unutterably patient to the last, but broken-hearted from the very first. The young man put his grief away from him, and set himself to consider the new business of his life. The one desire of his mind was that of vengeance upon his mother’s nameless enemy; and the thought that this enemy was his own father was powerless to soften his heart in the smallest measure, or to hinder him for one single hour from the achievement of his purpose. “I want to know who he is,” he said to himself. “My first business must be to discover his name; my next, to make him more ashamed of that name than I am of my namelessness.” He went to the chimney-piece, where there was a letter waiting for him, sealed with a sprawling black seal, and addressed to him in the inscrutable penmanship of his uncle.