He had perhaps never admired and loved his mother as he did then; not for what she was going to do, but for the spirit in which she was doing it. He was honest in trying to hinder her, because he vaguely feared that the step might cause her some inconvenience hereafter--he did not exactly know how, and he was firmly resolved that he would not under any circumstances take advantage of the arrangement to change his mode of life. Everything was to go on just as before. As a matter of theory, he was to have a fixed, settled income of his own; but as a matter of fact, he would not regard it as his. What he liked about it, and what really appealed to him in it all, was his mother’s man-like respect for his honour, and her frank admission that nothing she could do could possibly wipe out the slight she had put upon him. Then, too, the fact and the theory were at variance and in direct opposition to one another. As a matter of theory, nothing could ever give him back the sensation he had always felt since he had been a boy--that his mother would believe him on his word in the face of any evidence whatsoever which there might be against him. But as a matter of fact, the evil was not only completely undone, but there was a stronger bond between them than there had ever been before. That certainly was the first good thing which had come to him during the last four and twenty hours, and it had an effect upon his spirits. He thought over what his mother had said about the evening, too, and was convinced that she was right in advising him to tell the story frankly as it had happened. But he was conscious all the time that his anxiety about Katharine’s silence was increasing. He had roused himself at dawn, in spite of his fatigue, and had sent a servant out to post the letter with the special delivery stamp on it. Katharine must have received it long ago, and her answer might have been in his hands before now. Nevertheless, he told himself that he should not be impatient, that she had doubtless slept late after the ball, and that she would send him an answer as soon as she could. By no process of reasoning or exaggeration of doubting could he have reached the conclusion that she had never received his letter. She had always got everything he sent her, and there had never been any difficulty about their correspondence in all the years during which they had exchanged little notes. He took up the magazine again, and turned over the pages idly. Suddenly Frank Miner’s name caught his eye. The little man had really got a story into one of the great magazines, a genuine novel, it seemed, for this was only a part, and there were the little words at the end of it, in italics and in parenthesis, ‘to be continued,’ which promised at least two more numbers, for as John reflected, when the succeeding number was to be the last, the words were ‘to be concluded.’ He was glad, for Miner’s sake, of this first sign of something like success, and began to read the