Sixteen years! a large slice out of a woman’s life who had not yet done more than pass the half-way milestone of human existence. She had never possessed so much even of the merest rudimentary education as to know what the position of Richard Ross’s wife meant, except that it involved living in a house, wearing good clothes, and being surrounded by people of whom she was frightened, who did not understand her, and whom she could not understand. Since her flight back into her natural condition, the slow years had brought to her maturing mind thoughts which she understood as little. She was not more educated, more clever, nor indeed more clear in her confused fancies, than when she gave back one of her boys, driven thereto by a wild sense of justice, into his father’s keeping; but many strange things had seemed to pass before her dreamy eyes since then,--things she could not fathom, vague visions of what might have been right, of what was wrong. These had come to little practical result, except in so far that she had carefully preserved her boy Dick from contact with the evil around--had trained him in her way to truth and goodness and some strange sense of honour--had got him even a little education, the faculties of reading and writing, which were to herself a huge distinction among her tribe; and by keeping him in her own dreamy and silent but pure companionship, had preserved the lad from moral harm. She had however, in doing this, a material to work upon which had saved her much trouble. The boy was, to begin with, of a character as incomprehensible to her as were the other vague and strange influences which had shaped her shipwrecked life. He was good, gentle, more advanced than herself, his teacher, in the higher things which she tried to teach him, getting by instinct to conclusions which only painfully and dimly had forced themselves upon her, not subject to the temptations which she expected to move him, not lawless, nor violent, nor hard to control, but full of reason and sense and steady trustworthiness from his cradle. She had by this time got over the surprise with which she had slowly come to recognise in Dick a being totally different from herself. She was no analyst of character, and she had accepted the fact with dumb wonder which did not know how to put itself into words. Even now there awaited her many lesser surprises, as Dick, going on from step to step in life, did things which it never would have occurred to her to do, and showed himself totally impervious to those temptations against which it had been necessary for her to struggle. His last declaration to her was as surprising as anything that went before it. The nomad’s son, who had been “on the tramp” all his life, whose existence had been spent “on the road,” alternating between the noisy excitement of those scenes of amusement which youth generally loves, and that dull semi-hibernation of the winter which gives the tramp so keen a zest for