“Lionel Haughton,” said Guy Darrell, regaining his young cousin’s side, and speaking in a firm and measured voice, “I have to thank you for one very happy minute; the sight of a heart so fresh in the limpid purity of goodness is a luxury you cannot comprehend till you have come to my age; journeyed, like me, from Dan to Beersheba, and found all barren. Heed me: if you had been half-a-dozen years older, and this child for whom you plead had been a fair young woman, perhaps just as innocent, just as charming,--more in peril,--my benevolence would have lain as dormant as a stone. A young man’s foolish sentiment for a pretty girl,--as your true friend, I should have shrugged my shoulders and said, ‘Beware!’ Had I been your father, I should have taken alarm and frowned. I should have seen the sickly romance which ends in dupes and deceivers. But at your age, you, hearty, genial, and open-hearted boy,--you, caught but by the chivalrous compassion for helpless female childhood,--oh, that you were my son,--oh, that my dear father’s blood were in those knightly veins! I had a son once! God took him;” the strong man’s lips quivered: he hurried on. “I felt there was manhood in you, when you wrote to fling my churlish favours in my teeth; when you would have left my roof-tree in a burst of passion which might be foolish, but was nobler than the wisdom of calculating submission, manhood, but only perhaps man’s pride as man,--man’s heart not less cold than winter. To-day you have shown me something far better than pride; that nature which constitutes the heroic temperament is completed by two attributes,--unflinching purpose, disinterested humanity. I know not yet if you have the first; you reveal to me the second. Yes! I accept the duties you propose to me; I will do more than leave to you the chance of discovering this poor child. I will direct my solicitor to take the right steps to do so. I will see that she is safe from the ills you feel for her. Lionel, more still, I am impatient till I write to Mrs. Haughton. I did her wrong. Remember, I have never seen her. I resented in her the cause of my quarrel with your father, who was once dear to me. Enough of that. I disliked the tone of her letters to me. I disliked it in the mother of a boy who had Darrell blood; other reasons too,--let them pass. But in providing for your education; I certainly thought her relations provided for her support. She never asked me for help there; and, judging of her hastily, I thought she would not have scrupled to do so, if my help there had not been forestalled. You have made me understand her better; and, at all events, three-fourths of what we are in boyhood most of us owe to our mothers! You are frank, fearless, affectionate, a gentleman. I respect the mother who has such a son.”