drawing, and, on handing it to him, had been bewildered by his sadden change of expression.
"Is it aught of yours?" he had asked.
"Yes," the young fellow had answered; "it's mine."
But, instead of replacing it in his pocket, he had torn it slowly into strips, and thrown it, piece by piece, into the fire, watching it as it burned.
It was not Janey's eminently practical observations which had stirred him to-night. He had been drifting toward this feverish crisis of feeling for months, and had contested its approach inch by inch. There were hours when he was overpowered by the force of what he battled against, and this was one of them.
It was nearly midnight when he returned, and his mother met him at the door with an anxious look. It was a look he had seen upon her face all his life; but its effect upon himself had never lessened from the day he had first recognized it, as a child.
"I did not think you would wait for me," he said. "It is later than I thought."
"I am not tired," she answered.
She had aged a little since her husband's death, but otherwise she had not changed. She looked up at her son just as she had looked at his father,—watchfully, but saying little.
"Are you going to bed?"
"I am going upstairs," he replied. But he did not say that he was going to bed.
He bade her good-night shortly afterward, and went to his room. It was the one his father had used before his death, and the trunk containing his belongings stood in one corner of it.
For a short time after entering the room he paced the
