"How are you, little mother?" he said, taking off his cap, and smoothing back the tangles of his thick flaxen hair. "Why did you sit up for me? I told you I should be late. It was our last dancing lesson for the winter, and they made a sort of ball of it. If some of our young ladies and gentlemen had not been of such very tender years, we should have been at it still. But not a few of our partners were prematurely carried off, by their respective nursery maids;--a fact they would not have owned for worlds--and so we had to break up without dancing in the morning. You have been nodding a bit, I hope?" "Not I, my son," she said, in a quiet tone. "Care keeps mothers awake at home, when grown-up sons and daughters go racketing to balls and parties. However I believe I should have done wiser in going to bed, than in sitting up here with my teapot, waiting for light-footed young gentlemen who, I perceive, have already quenched their thirst at a less insipid tap than my domestic teapot." "You perceive, do you little mother?" he answered gaily, disposing of his long limbs under the little table as well as their length admitted of; "and how do you perceive that?" "This how: you never walked home singing in your life before; and we cannot attribute any ordinary cause, to an effort of nature so extraordinary as to produce what it never had. To be sure, the production was accordingly." He laughed. "What a wonderfully sagacious little mother! your perceptions are correct as far as you see, but you don't see far enough. I confess to some disturbance somewhere, but not in the upper works, as you suppose. His worship the burgermeister's mild punch is brewed with far too careful a consideration of the tender years of upper tertia, to do much mischief among us other fellows. Altogether, the refreshments affect the sober system, and I am afraid your provender here will have to suffer for it I abominate the trash and sweet-stuff they feed a fellow with at parties. Come, little mother, just give us a spoonful more rum in this tea, and cure one giddiness with another. For, as I said before, there is something wrong about me. I _am_ hard hit." He looked at her in mock distress, with a saucy sparkle in his deep blue eyes. "Walter," she began, in some dismay, "what have you been about? I trust you have not----?" The young fellow helped himself to a slice of bread and meat, and fell to his supper with a ponderous gravity, that was meant to cover a shade of embarrassment. "I suppose no man can escape his fate," he said, chewing away with prosaic complacency, "sooner or later, there always must be a first time; and when a fellow comes to be nineteen, it becomes an affair of _amour propre_ to do as others do, and fall in--" he hesitated and she laughed. "In love?--I do believe this foolish fellow is trying to persuade himself and me, that he has fallen in love!"