Arthur knew his power over the widow, and the young tyrant was touched
whilst he exercised it. In those two days he brought her almost into
submission, and patronised her very kindly; and he passed one evening
with the lovely pie-maker at Chatteris, in which he bragged of his
influence over his mother; and he spent the other night in composing a
most flaming and conceited copy of verses to his divinity, in which he
vowed, like Montrose, that he would make her famous with his sword and
glorious by his pen, and that he would love her as no mortal woman had
been adored since the creation of womankind.

It was on that night, long after midnight, that wakeful Helen, passing
stealthily by her son's door, saw a light streaming through the chink of
the door into the dark passage, and heard Pen tossing and tumbling, and
mumbling verses in his bed. She waited outside for a while, anxiously
listening to him. In infantile fevers and early boyish illnesses, many a
night before, the kind soul had so kept watch. She turned the lock very
softly now, and went in so gently, that Pen for a moment did not see her.
His face was turned from her. His papers on his desk were scattered
about, and more were lying on the bed round him. He was biting a pencil
and thinking of rhymes and all sorts of follies and passions. He was
Hamlet jumping into Ophelia's grave: he was the Stranger taking Mrs.
Haller to his arms, beautiful Mrs. Haller, with the raven ringlets
falling over her shoulders. Despair and Byron, Thomas Moore and all the
Loves of the Angels, Waller and Herrick, Beranger and all the love-songs
he had ever read, were working and seething in this young gentleman's
mind, and he was at the very height and paroxysm of the imaginative
frenzy when his mother found him.

"Arthur," said the mother's soft silver voice: and he started up and