it and you will know that her feet did not stray--nor did her pretty
eyes. Her heart was too full for the cravings of vanity. Innocent
ladies who get their husbands into scrapes are innocent, perhaps; but
knock you next door in their bosoms, where the soul resides, and ask for
information of how innocence and uncleanness may go together. Kirby
purchased a mine in Carinthia, on the borders of Styria, and worked it
himself. His native land displeased him, so that he would not have been
unwilling to see Chillon enter the Austrian service, which the young man
was inclined for, subsequent to his return to his parents from one of the
English public schools, notwithstanding his passionate love for Old
England. But Lord Levellier explained the mystery in a letter to his
half-forgiven sister, praising the boy for his defence of his mother's
name at the school, where a big brutal fellow sneered at her, and Chillon
challenged him to sword or pistol; and then he walked down to the boy's
home in Staffordshire to force him to fight; and the father of the boy
made him offer an apology. That was not much balm to Master Chillon's
wound. He returned to his mother quite heavy, unlike a young man; and
the unhappy lady, though she knew, him to be bitterly sensitive on the
point of honour, and especially as to everything relating to her, saw
herself compelled to tell him the history of her life, to save him, as
she thought, from these chivalrous vindications of her good name. She
may have even painted herself worse than she was, both to excuse her
brother's miserliness to her son and the world's evil speaking of her.
Wisely or not, she chose this course devotedly to protect him from the
perils she foresaw in connection with the name of the once famous
Countess Fanny in the British Isles. And thus are we stricken by the
days of our youth. It is impossible to moralize conveniently when one is
being hurried by a person at one's elbow.

So the young man heard his mother out and kissed her, and then he went