The end of the season arrived, Cosmo came home, leaving his fellow-student, who would not even accept an invitation to Norlaw, behind him in Edinburgh. Cameron thought it half a weakness on his part, the sudden affection to which the boy had moved him, but he would not yield so much to it as to lay himself under “an obligation,” nor suffer any one to suppose that any motive whatever, save pure liking, mingled in the unlikely friendship he had permitted himself to form. Inveterate poverty teaches its victims a strange suspiciousness; he was half afraid that some one might think he wanted to share the comforts of Cosmo’s home; so, as he was not going home himself, he remained in Edinburgh, working and sparing as usual, and once more expanding a little with the idea, so often proved vain hitherto, of getting so much additional work as to provide for his next session, leaving it free to its own proper studies; and Cosmo returned to rejoice the hearts of the women in Norlaw. Who found him grown and altered, and “mair manlike,” and stronger, and every way improved, to their hearts’ content. The Mistress was not given to caresses or demonstrations of affection--but when the lad got home, and saw his mother’s eye brighten, and her brow clear every time she looked at him, he felt, with a compunction for his own discontented thoughts, of how much importance he was to the widow, and tried hard to restrain the instinct of wandering, which many circumstances had combined to strengthen in his mind, although he had never spoken of it. Discontent with his present destination for one thing; the example of Huntley and Patrick; the perpetual spur to his energy which had been before him during all his stay in Edinburgh, in the person of Cameron; his eager visionary desire to seek Mary of Melmar, whom the boy had a strong fancy that _he_ was destined to find; and, above and beyond all, a certain vague ambition, which he could not have described to any one, but which lured him with a hundred fanciful charms--moved him to the new world and the unknown places, which charmed chiefly because they were new and unknown. Cosmo had written verses secretly for a year or two, and lately had sent some to an Edinburgh paper, which, miracle of fortune! published them. He was not quite assured that he was a poet, but he thought he could be something if he might but reach that big, glorious world which all young fancies long for, and the locality of which dazzling impossible vision, is so oddly and so often placed in London. Cosmo was not sure that it was in London--but he rather thought it was not in Edinburgh, and he was very confident it could not be in Norlaw.