"They have taken him away," she said briefly, without looking up.
"Please care for his horse and accept my thanks," and then she
hastened to her room and did not appear again that day.

He complied with her request, then went back to his work, and the
grain fell as if the reaper were Death himself.

Mrs. Arnold's course was not so harsh and rude as it seemed, and
can readily be explained on the theory by which she governed her
feelings and actions toward her son. An obscure weakness in the
functions of his heart had rendered him subject to fainting turns
from early childhood. Physicians had always cautioned against
over-exertion and over-excitement of any kind; therefore he had
not been sent to school like the other children, or permitted to
indulge in the sports natural to his age. Having been constantly
cautioned, curbed, and repressed, he grew into a timid, self-distrustful,
irresolute man, and yet was keenly sensible of the defects that
separated him from other men. No one ever longed for independence
more earnestly than he; few were less able to achieve it. His
mother, having shielded him so many years from himself as well
as from adverse influences from without, had formed the habit of
surveillance. Exaggerating his weakness and dependence, his unfitness
to compete with other men in active pursuits, she had almost ignored
his manhood. The rest of the family naturally took their tone from
her, regarding him as an invalid, and treating him as one. Chafing
with secret and increasing bitterness over his misfortune and
anomalous position, he grew more and more silent and reserved,
dwelling apart in a world created from a literature that was not
of the best or most wholesome character. As long as he lived a
quiet, monotonous life that accorded with the caution enjoined by