"Whose then?" he said, very softly, holding his breath to listen; and as his head rested on her knee, he felt how she shivered through all her limbs at the recollection. "Whose fault was it?" he whispered, with his eyes fixed on the ceiling--on a spot where a tiny ring of light was flickering above the cylinder of the little lamp. "It is not a long story," she said reluctantly; "but a story that is neither new nor pretty: and so why should I tell it you? If you had been a daughter, instead of being a son, I should not have let you grow up to be nineteen, without having told it. It might not have done much good, what stories ever did? But at least, I should have done my duty by her, as a mother. But you that are a man, what good could I have done, by telling you that man is a rapacious and a selfish animal. If your own conscience has not taught you that, sooner or later it will." "Rapacious? You know me better, little mother!" "Right dear boy;" she said, much moved. "And if I had not expected you to be different from other men, should I have taken the trouble, all these eleven years to help you out of your childhood? No, dear, in that sense you will never be a man: could you have even believed it possible that a man could break his plighted troth to a helpless maiden, simply because she told him that she had nothing to bring him, but her face and her fair fame, and her sweet seventeen?" Walter started from his seat, and took a few hasty turns about the room; then dropping down again on the stool at her feet. "Tell me all;" he said. "What is there to tell?" she answered sadly. "What signifies name and date and place? I have taught myself to forget it, but it has made me old before my time--I could not forget that if I would, for my glass tells me that every morning." "Your glass tells fibs then," said Walter, interrupting her. "I have watched you narrowly; when you are by yourself, or with a person you dislike, you can look so grave and stem as to frighten people. But with me, when you are cheerful, and especially when you laugh, I often think there is not a girl I know, so young or so handsome as my own mamma."