"I have never met the old gentleman," she continued, "but we write to each other twice a year the most friendly letters. So there is nothing to fear from that quarter. I assure you, Leo, that you have only to raise your little finger, and the richest heiress in the country will be your wife." She paused triumphantly. But instead of answering, he whistled his favourite Mexican air "Paloma" and smiled into vacancy. His mother was hurt. "I have taken so much trouble to arrange it," she said. "It has cost me thousands of sleepless nights, and you don't even repay me with 'thank you.'" "It takes two people to make a marriage, my mother," he replied. "I am an elderly good-for-nothing. I have been a vagabond, absentee landlord, and I am packed full of sins up to my throat. And she--she is a child." "Next spring she will be seventeen," was the answer. "Well, then, I say 'thank you,'" he said standing up, "and when I am out of the hole I am in at present, we will, perhaps, return to the subject." The mother strongly objected. He would thus give her time to lose her heart to some foolish youth, who would fill her head with nonsense. Had she not been specially designed for him? Didn't she rave about him, and dream about him before she had even seen him? Was she, now that he had come back, to be repulsed and slighted? "But perhaps she doesn't attract you," she went on in an anxious tone. "Or there is some one else--some one you have fallen in love with away, or even secretly married? Are you going to bring a creole here as your wife, or one of those ladies who knock about the world in search of adventures? I tell you, Leo, that if you do, I shall take to my bed and die." He did his best to reassure her. He had come home as free as when he went away, and had done once for all with affairs of the heart. She wiped her eyes, but the tears would well forth afresh. "Oh, my boy, my boy!" she sobbed, and stroked his hand with trembling fingers. "What is the matter?" he asked gently. But he knew well enough. Since the day he received his sentence he had not seen her face to face, and in this moment her mother's heart was living through again the world of sorrow which her son's wildness had once created for her. "Stop crying, mother," he implored. "Ah! what have I not suffered for your sake?" she wailed. "Why did you go and shoot Rhaden dead? Rhaden, who was an intimate friends of ours, and Felicitas's husband besides, so a kind of relation." He reminded her that it was Rhaden and no other who had challenged him. "But couldn't you have shot in the air?" she inquired. "It is so often done." "You don't understand, dear," he answered. "If I had been brought home dead, you would have had even a greater trial to bear on my account. Rhaden, you know, never jested."