It was she who first urged that they should go to Holland. Jan’s grandfather was dead,—Mr. Ford’s client could make no reparation there,—but the cousin to whom the old wooden house now belonged gave Jan many things which had been his mother’s. Amongst these was a book of sketches by herself, and a collection of etchings by her great-grandfather, a Dutch artist; and in this collection Jan found the favorite of his childhood. Did the genius in him really take its rise in the old artist who etched those willows which he had once struggled to rival with slate-pencil? His mother’s sketches were far inferior to his own; but with the loving and faithful study of nature which they showed, perhaps, too, with the fact that they were chiefly gathered from homely and homelike scenes, from level horizons and gray skies, Jan felt a sympathy which stirred him to the heart. His delight in them touched Lady Adelaide even more than it moved his father. But then no personal inconvenience in the past, no long habits of suffering and selfishness, blunted her sense of the grievous wrong that had been done to her husband’s gifted son. Nor to him alone! It was with her husband’s dead wife that Lady Adelaide’s sympathies were keenest,—the mother, like herself, of an only child. Mr. Ford’s client went almost unwillingly to his wife’s grave, by the side of which her old father’s bones now rested. But Jan and Lady Adelaide hastened thither, hand in hand, and the painter’s pledge was redeemed. Since the old man died, it had been little tended, and weeds grew rank where flowers had once been planted. Jan threw himself on the neglected grave. “My poor mother!” he cried, almost bitterly. For a moment the full sense of their common wrong seemed to overwhelm him, and he shrank even from Lady Adelaide. But when, kneeling beside him, she bent her face as if the wind that sighed among the grass stalks could carry her words to ears long dulled in death,—“My _poor_ child! _I_ will be a mother to your son!”—Jan’s heart turned back with a gush of gratitude to his good stepmother. He had much reason to be grateful: then, and through many succeeding years, when her training fitted him to take his place without awkwardness in society, and her tender care atoned (so she hoped) for the hardships of the past.