youth there. I love the old place, and almost long to see the old
hut where I lived, and the hall where I went to school, and the
wooded valley that lies between them, where I gathered wild-flowers
and fruits in summer and nuts in winter, and--my mother's grave,"
said the unconscious son, speaking confidentially, and looking
straight into his father's eyes.

"Ishmael," said Herman Brudenell, in a faltering voice, and
forgetting to be formal, "you must come to me: that grave should
draw you, if nothing else; it is a pious pilgrimage when a son goes
to visit his mother's grave."

There was something in this new friend's words, look, and manner
that always drew out the young man's confidence, and he said, in a
voice trembling with emotion:

"She died young, sir; and oh! so sorrowfully! She was only nineteen,
two years younger than I am now; and her son was motherless the hour
he was born."

Violent emotion shook the frame of Herman Brudenell. He had not
entered the room with any intention of making a disclosure to
Ishmael; but he felt now that--come life, come death, come whatever
might of it--he must claim Nora's son.

"Ishmael," he began, in a voice shaken with agitation, "I knew your
mother."

"You, sir!" exclaimed the young man in surprise.