“My boy,” she said in a low voice, “I have been thinking a great deal of the sad scene which took place in connection with your dear father’s death, and of my subsequent conduct towards you, and I have come to apologise to you. I do not know the exact circumstances that led you to act as you have done,—I may even say that I scarcely wish to know them; but on reflection I feel that nothing but the strongest reasons or considerations of honour would have induced you to refuse your father’s last request, and that I have therefore no right to judge you harshly. This came home to me when I saw you leaving the room yonder a few nights since, and your face showed me what you were suffering. But at that time my heart was too frozen with grief, and, I fear, also too much filled with resentment against you to allow me to speak. If you can tell me anything that will give me a better understanding of the causes of all this dreadful trouble, I shall be grateful to you; for then we may perhaps consult together and find some way out of it. But I repeat that I do not come to force your confidence. I come, Henry, to express my regret, and to mourn with you over a husband and a father whom we both loved dearly,”—and, moved by a sudden impulse of affection, she bent down and kissed her son upon the forehead. He returned the embrace, and said, “Mother, those are the first kind words that I have heard for a long while from any member of my family; and I can assure you that I am grateful for them, and shall not forget them, for I thought that you had come here to revile me like everybody else. You say that you do not ask my confidence, but fortunately a man can speak out to his mother without shame, even when he has cause to be ashamed of what he must tell her. Now listen, mother: as you know, I never was a favourite in this house; I dare say through my own fault, but so it is. From boyhood everybody more or less looked down upon me, and, with the exception of yourself, I doubt if anybody cared for me much. Well, I determined to make my own way in the world and to show you all that there was something in me, and to a certain extent I succeeded. I worked hard to succeed too; I denied myself in many ways, and above all I kept myself clear from the vices that most young men fall into in one shape or another. Then came this dreadful business of my brother’s death, and just as I was beginning really to get on I was asked to leave the profession which was everything to me. From the letters that reached me I gathered that in some mysterious way it lay in my power, and in mine alone, to pull the family affairs out of the mire if I returned home. So I retired from the Service and I came, because I thought that it was my duty, for hitherto I have tried to do my duty when I could see my way to it. On the first night of my arrival here I learned the true state of affairs from Ellen, and I learned also what it was expected that I should do to remedy it—namely, that I