The wan and weary mother, whom he remembered as always clothed in widow's weeds, and toiling in painful drudgery to maintain herself and her only boy; who had smiled and wept, rendered thanksgivings and uttered prayers for strength, alternately, as she heard Mr. Marlow's proposal to protect and help the lad through the world that had borne so hardly upon her; who had strained him to her bosom, and shed fast, hot tears of speechless anguish at their parting--a farewell that was never to be forgotten in any meeting on this side of eternity; this was the vision, hers the palladium of love, that had nerved him for the close wrestle with fortune, guarded him amid the burning ploughshares of temptation, carried him unscathed past the hundred mouths of hell, that gape upon the innocent and unwary in all large cities. Cold and unsusceptible as he was deemed in society, he kept unpolluted in his breast a fresh living stream of genuine romantic feeling, such as we are apt to think went out of fashion--aye, and out of being--with the belted knights of yore; wealth he had vowed never to squander, never reveal, until he should pour it, without one thought of self-reserve, upon his wife! He never hinted this to a living creature before the moment came for revealing it to the object of his choice. He was a "predestined old bachelor!" and "infidel to love and the sex," said and believed the gay and frivolous, and he let them talk. His ideal woman, his mother's representative and successor--the beauty and crown of his existence--was too sacred for the gaze and comment of indifferent worldlings. For her he labored and studied and lived; confident in a fatalistic belief that, at the right moment, the dream would become a reality--the phantasm leave her cloudy height for his arms. Love so beautiful and intense as this, like snow in its purity, like fire in its fervor, cannot be won to full and eloquent utterance but by answering love--a sentiment identical in kind, if not equal in degree; and Sarah Hammond's estimate of her husband's affection was, in consequence of this want in herself, cruelly unjust in its coldness and poverty. His patience with her transient fits of gloom or waywardness in the early months of their married life; his noble forgetfulness of her faults, and grateful acknowledgment of her most trifling effort to please him; his unceasing care; his lavish bounty--all these she attributed too much to natural amiability and conscientious views of duty; too little to his warm regard for her personally. In this persuasion she had copied his conduct in externals so far as she could; and applauding observers adjudged the mock gem to be a fair and equitable equivalent for the rare pearl she had received.