While the mother might, more than once in a day, differ to fault-finding from her elder-born--whom she admired, notwithstanding, as well as loved, from the bottom of her heart--she was never KNOWN to say a word in opposition to the younger. It was even whispered that she was afraid of him. It was not so; but her reverence for Ian was such that, even when she felt bound not to agree with him, she seldom had the confidence that, differing from HIM, she was in the right. Sometimes in the middle of the night she would slip like a ghost into the room where he lay, and sit by his bed till the black cock, the gray cock, the red cock crew. The son might be awake all the time, and the mother suspect him awake, yet no word pass between them. She would rise and go as she came. Her feeling for her younger son was like that of Hannah for her eldest--intensest love mixed with strangest reverence. But there were vast alternations and inexplicable minglings in her thoughts of him. At one moment she would regard him as gifted beyond his fellows for some great work, at another be filled with a horrible fear that he was in rebellion against the God of his life. Doubtless mothers are far too ready to think THEIR sons above the ordinary breed of sons: self, unpossessed of God, will worship itself in its offspring; yet the sons whom HOLY mothers have regarded as born to great things and who have passed away without sign, may have gone on toward their great things. Whether this mother thought too much of her son or not, there were questions moving in his mind which she could not have understood--even then when he would creep to her bed in the morning to forget in her arms the terrible dreams of the night, or when at evening he would draw his little stool to her knee, unable or unwilling to enjoy his book anywhere but by her side.