I do not know what wild sense of peril was in the poor creature’s heart. She feared, perhaps, that they could have taken her up and punished her for running away from her husband; she felt sure that they would separate her from her remaining boy--though had they not the other, whom she had given up to them? and in her panic at the chance of being found out, all power of reasoning (if she ever had any) deserted her. Ah, she thought to herself, only a tramp is safe! As soon as you have a settled habitation, and are known to neighbours, and can be identified by people about, all security leaves you: only on the tramp is a woman who wishes to hide herself safe. In her first panic, the thought of going away again, of deserting everything, of taking refuge on those open roads--those outdoor bivouacs which are full in the eye of day, yet better refuges than any mysterious darkness--came so strongly over her, that it was all she could do to withstand its force. But when she looked at her son, active and trim, in his boat-building yard, or saw him studying the little house at night, with his tools in his hand, to judge where he could put up something or improve something--his mother felt herself for the first (or perhaps it was the second) time in her life, bound as it were by a hundred minute threads which made it impossible for her to please herself. It was something like a new soul which had thus developed in her. In former times she had done as the spirit moved her, obeying her impulses whenever they were so strong as to carry everything else before them. Now she felt a distinct check to the wild force of these impulses. The blood in her veins moved as warmly as ever, impelling her to go, and she knew that she was free to go if she would, and that Dick too could be vanquished, and would come with her, however unwillingly. She was free to go, and yet she could not. For the first time in her life she had learned consciously to prefer another to herself. She could not ruin Dick. The struggle that she maintained with her old self was violent, but it was within herself, and was known to nobody; and finally, the new woman, the higher creature, vanquished the old self-willed and self-regarding wanderer. She set herself to meet the winter with a dogged resolution, feeling less, perhaps, the absence of that visionary solace which she had found in the sight of Val, in consequence of the hard and perpetual battle she had to fight with herself. And, to make it harder, she had not the cheery gratitude and tender appreciation of the struggle, which had rewarded her much less violent effort before. Dick was gloomy, overcast, pondering upon the strange thing that had happened. He could not get over it: it stood between him and his mother, making their intercourse constrained and unhappy. Had she _robbed_ the old lady from whom she had fled in so strange a panic? Short of that, or something of that kind, why, poor