“Everard,” she began, “there are so many things I must say to you about the past and the future, and I must say them now while I have the strength. Another day may be too late.” He knew to what she referred, and with a protest against it, told her she was not going to die; she must not; she must live for him, who would be nothing without her. Very gently she soothed him into quiet, and he listened while she talked of all he had been, and all she wished him to be in the future. Faithfully, but gently, she went over with his faults, one by one, beseeching him to forsake them, and with a bursting heart he promised everything which she required, and told her again of the reform already commenced. “God bless you, my boy, and prosper you as you keep this pledge to your dying mother, and whether you are great or not, may you be good and Christlike, and come one day to meet me where sorrow is unknown,” she said to him finally; then, after a pause, she continued: “There is one subject more of which, as a woman and your mother, I must speak to you. Some day you will marry, of course——” “Yes, mother,” and Everard started violently, while the cold sweat stood in drops about his lips, but he could say no more then, and his mother continued: “I have thought many times who and what your wife would be, and have pictured her often to myself, and loved her for your sake; but I shall never see her, when she comes here I shall be gone, and so I will speak of her now, and say it is not my wish that you should wait many years before marrying. I believe in early marriages, where there is mutual love and esteem. Then you make allowance more readily for each other’s habits and peculiarities. I mean no disrespect to your father, he has been kind to me, but I think he waited too long; there were too many years between us; my feelings and ideas were young, his middle-aged; better begin alike for perfect unity. And, my boy, be sure you marry a lady.” “A lady, mother?” Everard said, wondering if his mother would call Josephine a lady. “Yes, Everard,” she replied, “a lady in the true sense of the word, a person of education and refinement, and somewhere near your own rank in life. I never believed in the Maud Muller poem, never was sorry that the judge did not take the maiden for his wife. He might, perhaps, never have blushed for _her_, but he would have blushed for her family, and their likeness in his children’s faces would have been a secret annoyance. I do not say that every _mesalliance_ proves unhappy, but it is better to marry your equal, if you can, for a low-born person, with low-born tastes, will, of necessity, drag you down to her level.”