and she could not help feeling an incipient certainty, not altogether new to her, that with a person possessing such qualities as hers all must go well. Fortified by these hopes, the mother and daughter saw Tom and Will depart with equanimity. “Well, mother,” Will said, as he shook her by the hand (North-country people are not given to demonstrations of affection), “I hope you’ll soon have word of that boy. You needn’t fret: we’ve been in a good many scrapes, but we’ve always got safe out of them.” Will was the best fellow of the two. Tom took it altogether more easily. “Yes, yes, you’ll hear,” he said; “I’m not the least afraid. Harry’s like the ill-penny that always turns up. There’s nothing that I can see to fret about.” Joan nodded to them when they got on their horses with a friendly satisfaction to be quit of them. She had no ideal to be offended in her brothers. Mrs. Joscelyn, when her momentary buoyancy of new hope was over, felt bitterly to the depths of her foolish heart that her sons were of a very common, selfish grain, such as some years ago it would have broken her heart to think of. She had been drilled into it, and had yielded to necessity; but still when something made her observation clearer she remembered and felt the downfall. The slow coming down of heart and hope by which a woman arrives at the fact that her child is not ideal, nor even excellent, nor superior in any way to the coarsest common _pâte_ of man, is very gradual. Perhaps the greater number do not reach it at all, but are content to deceive themselves and think all their offspring right and perfect. But Mrs. Joscelyn was not of this kind. She could not get over her sons’ indifference. “Another man going out to bring me news--taking all that trouble--a stranger that is nothing to us--and my own boys, my own boys caring nothing.” Over this again the poor soul, faithful in all the devices of self-torment, shed a few bitter tears. “Now, mother, you are beginning to fuss again,” said Joan, in a vexed tone. “Dear, dear, haven’t we trouble enough?” Even she who shared the real family grief so warmly thought this one of “mother’s fusses,” and was impatient at her folly. “As if everybody didn’t know that Will and Tom were just----Will and Tom,” Joan said to herself. That they had turned out to be so instead of being heroes, did not strike her as a subject of complaint.