The young man thrust his kinsman’s letter in his breast, and paced the playground slowly for some time, meditating the loss that had come upon him. In one of the big class-rooms near at hand his pupils were waiting for him; and there was wonderment and consternation at this delay in the most punctual of all the masters. His tears had dropped fast upon the letter some time ago; but his eyes were dry now. The dull agony which filled his breast was rather a sense of desolation than a poignant grief. He had seen and known that his mother was fading from this troubled earth before his coming to Belgium; and poverty’s bitterest penalty had been the necessity which had separated him from her. The shadow of this coming sorrow had long darkened the horizon of his young life. The sad reality had come upon him a little sooner than he had expected it, and that was all. He bowed his head, and resigned himself to this affliction; but there was something to which he could not resign himself, and that was the manner of his loss. “Alone--in a hired lodging--with a poor, ill-paid, hard-working drudge for her sole companion and consoler! O mother, mother, you were too bright a creature for so sad a fate!” And then there arose before this young man’s eyes one of those pictures which were continually haunting him--the picture of what his life and his mother’s life might have been, had things been different with them. He fancied himself the beloved and acknowledged son of a good and honourable man; he fancied his mother a happy wife. Ah! then how changed all would have been! Sickness and death would have come all the same, perhaps, since there is no earthly barrier that can exclude those dark visitors from happy households. They would have come, the dreaded guests, but with how different an aspect! He made for himself the picture of two death-beds. By one there knelt a group of loving children, weeping silently for a dying mother, while a grief-stricken husband suppressed all outward evidence of his sorrow, lest he should trouble the departing spirit whose earthly tabernacle was supported by his fond arms. And the other death-bed! Alas, how sad the contrast between the two pictures! A woman lying alone in a dingy chamber, abandoned and forgotten by every creature in the world except her son, and even he away from her.