only when they have suffered shock, so often in life we may go along
unconscious of the vital dependencies of our human relationships, till
the moment comes to strain or sever them. Then a thousand hidden nerves
quiver at the discovering touch of the knife. Henry's leaving home,
though it had been originally the suggestion of violent feeling, was not
to be an actual severance. His father's "leave my house for ever" had
owed something to the rhetoric of anger, and the expulsion and cutting
off which it had implied had since been so softened as practically to
have disappeared. Henry was certainly not leaving his father's house for
ever, but merely going into lodgings with a friend, with full privileges
to visit his own home as often as he chose.

Still, he was, all the same, leaving home, and he was the first to leave
it. The mother, at all events, knew that this was the beginning of the
end, knew that, with her first-born's departure (desertion, she may have
called it), a new era had commenced for the home,--the era of
disintegration. For twenty years and more it had been all building and
building; now it would be all just pulling down again; and there was a
dreary sound as of demolition and wind-driven rain in her ears.

Oh, tragic love of mothers! Of no love is the final loss and doom so
inevitably destined. The husband may desert the wife, but the son is
sure to desert his mother--must, for nature demands the desertion. Put
not your trust in princes--and yet put it rather in princes, oh, fond
and doting parents, than in the blue-eyed flower of childhood for which
year after year, with labours infinite, you would buy all the sunshine
of the world.

Henry's pang at leaving home was mainly the pang of parting with his
mother. It seemed more than a mere physical parting. It was his