"You have something to tell me, mother? Something pleasant, I hope, about yourself." He had never spoken in a voice of such unreckoning love to Dora in all their meetings and partings. It was the broad, rich, even sound of a river that is always flowing in one direction and always full, not the tinkle of a capricious fountain or the tempestuous rush of a torrent at the mercy of exhaustion or drought. "I have, my son. It does not concern me, or if it does, but indirectly. Indeed, I do not know. It has to do with you, dear." They, like sweethearts, called one another "dear," because they were inexpressibly dear to one another. "With me, mother? And how?" John Hanbury was not a handsome man, but when he smiled at his slender, grey-haired mother, and patted her delicate white thin hands with his own large and brown, there was more than physical beauty in his looks, there was a subjugating, an intoxicating radiance, and all-completed prostration of his soul before the mother he worshipped. "I do not know exactly, John. Your father gave me in trust for you, as you know, a paper, which I was not to give to you except at some great crisis of your life. If no harm of any particular moment threatened you until you were thirty, you were never to see this paper." "I know," he said. "I was only seventeen then--not launched in the world--and he thought I might, when I came of age, and got my two thousand a-year, plunge into dissipation, and take to racing or backing horses, or cards, or something of that kind. Well, mother, I hope you are not uneasy about me on those scores? This paper is no doubt one of extremely good advice from an excellent father to a young son. I am sure I will read the paper with all the respect I owe to any words he may have left for my guidance. You do not think, mother, I am now likely to give way to any of those temptations?" She shook her small head gravely. "I do not fear you will give way to the ordinary temptations of youth, John. I know you too well to dread anything of the kind. I don't think the paper your father left me for you refers to the ordinary danger in a young man's path." "Then you must believe it has to do with unusual dangers, and you must believe I am now threatened by some unusual dangers?" said he with a start. He had been threatened by a very uncommon danger that day, the danger of being made a laughing stock for the whole town, but such a misfortune could never have been contemplated by his father. Compared with the importance of a message from his dead father, how poor and insignificant seemed his fears of the early part Of this day.