dressing-room. A deep, sonorous voice bade him enter. As he did so
Mrs. Herrick laid down the book she was reading on the toilet-table,
and turned to greet him. "My dearest boy, how glad I am to see you!"
she exclaimed with a warm, motherly kiss. Then she put her hands on
his shoulders and regarded him with an affectionate smile that quite
lighted up her homely face. Even in her youth Mrs. Herrick had never
been handsome. Indeed, her old friends maintained that she was far
better-looking in her middle age, in spite of all her hard work and
that burning of the candle at both ends which is so abhorrent to the
well-regulated mind. Her features were strongly marked, and somewhat
weather-beaten, and the lower part of the face was too heavily
moulded, but the clear, thoughtful gray eyes had a pleasant light in
them. Malcolm was secretly very proud of his mother. He liked to
watch her moving among her guests in the dignified, gracious way
that was habitual to her.

"She is the very personification of an old-fashioned English
gentlewoman," he said once to Cedric; "but she is hardly modern
enough in her ideas. She takes things too seriously, and that bores
people."

It must be confessed that to her young acquaintances Mrs. Herrick
was rather awe-inspiring. Mere pleasure-seekers--drones in the human
hive and all such ne'er-do-weels--were careful to give her a wide
berth. Her quiet little speeches sometimes had a sting in them. "She
takes the starch out of a fellow, don't you know," observed one of
these fashionable loafers, a young officer in the Hussars--"makes
him think he's a worm and no man, and that sort of thing; but she
doesn't understand us Johnnies." Perhaps Mrs. Herrick would
willingly have recalled her crushing speech when, years after, she