"Mother, I acknowledge you have a good right to be displeased. But that is not all. I am glad, anyhow--heartily glad to have you here." She looked up at him with her eyes full, and quivering lips. Everything went by impulse in the young man's mind, and this look--in which for once in his life he read the truth, the eagerness to forgive, the willingness to forget, the possibility, even in the moment of her deepest pain, of giving her happiness--went to his heart. After all it is a wonderful thing to have a human creature thus altogether dependent upon your words, your smile, ready to encounter all things for you, without hesitation, without a grudge. And why should she? What had he ever done for her? And she was no fool. These thoughts had already passed through his mind with a realisation of the wonder of it all, which seldom strikes the young at sight of the devotion of the old. All these things flashed back upon him at the sight of the dumb anguish yet forgiveness in her eyes. "Mother," he cried, "there's enough of this between you and me. I want you not for Underwood, but for everything. Why should you care for a cad like me? but you do----" "Care for you? Oh, my boy!" "I know; there you sit that have travelled night and day because I held up my finger: and would give me your life if you could, and bear everything, and never change and never tire. Why, in the name of God, why?" he cried with an outburst. "What have I ever done that you should do this for me? You are worth a score of such as I am, and yet you make yourself a slave--" "Oh, Walter, my dear! how vain are all these words. I am your mother," she said. Presently he drew a chair close to her and sat down beside her. "All these things have been put before me," he said, "to drive me to despair. I have tried to say that it was this vile lordship, and the burden of the family, that has made me bad, mother. But you know better than that," he said, looking up at her with a stormy gleam in his face that could not be called a smile, "and so do I." "Walter, God forbid that I should ever have thought you bad. You have been led astray." "To do--what I wanted to do," he said with another smile, "that is what is called leading astray between a man and those who stand between him and the devil; but I have talked with one who thinks of no such punctilios. Mother, vice deserves damnation; isn't that your creed?" "Walter!" "Oh, I know; but listen to me. If that were so, would a woman like you stand by the wretch still?" "My dearest boy! you are talking wildly. There are no circumstances, none! in which I should not stand by you." "That is what I thought," he said, "you and--But they say that you don't know, you women, how bad a man can be: and that if you knew--And then as for God----" "God knows everything, Walter."