“Poor mother,” he said, rising from his dinner, “you _are_ a feelin’ one! all this time, and you’ve never forgotten. I’ll go away and leave you quiet; and just before lock-up, when it’s getting dark, him and me will come across. You won’t say nothing you can help that’s dreadful if the cards turn up bad?--and speak as kind to him as you can, mother dear, he’s been so kind to me.” Speak as kind to him as you can! What words were these to be said to her whose whole being was disturbed and excited by the idea of seeing this stranger! Keep yourself from falling at his feet and kissing them; from falling on his neck and weeping over him. If Dick had but known, these were more likely things to happen. She scarcely saw her boy go out, or could distinguish what were the last words he said to her. Her heart was full of the other--the other, whose face her hungry eyes had not been able to distinguish from her window, who had never seen her, so far as he knew, and yet who was hers, though she dared not say so, dared not claim any share in him. Dared not! though she could not have told why. To her there were barriers between them impassable. She had given him up when he was a child for the sake of justice, and the wild natural virtue and honour in her soul stood between her and the child she had relinquished. It seemed to her that in giving him up she had come under a solemn tacit engagement never to make herself known to him, and she was too profoundly agitated now to be able to think. Indeed I do not think that reasonable sober thought, built upon just foundations, was ever possible to her. She could muse and brood, and did so, and had done so,--doing little else for many a silent year; and she could sit still, mentally, and allow her imagination and mind to be taken possession of by a tumult of fancy and feeling, which drew her now and then to a hasty decision, and which, had she been questioned on the subject, she would have called thinking--as, indeed, it stands for thinking with many of us. It had been this confused working in her of recollection and of a fanciful remorse which had determined her to give up Valentine to his father; and now that old fever seemed to have come back again, and to boil in her veins. I don’t know if she had seriously regretted her decision then, or if she had ever allowed herself to think of it as a thing that could have been helped, or that might still be remedied. But by this time, at least, she had come to feel that it never could be remedied, and that Valentine Ross, Lord Eskside’s heir, could never be carried off to the woods and fields as her son, as perhaps a child might have been. He was a gentleman now, she felt, with a forlorn pride, which mingled strangely with the anguish of absolute loss with which she realised the distance between them,--the tremendous and uncrossable gulf between his state and hers. He was her son, yet never could know her, never acknowledge her,--and she was to speak with him that night.