education; I certainly thought her relations provided for her support.
She never asked me for help there; and, judging of her hastily, I thought
she would not have scrupled to do so, if my help there had not been
forestalled. You have made me understand her better; and, at all events,
three-fourths of what we are in boyhood most of us owe to our mothers!
You are frank, fearless, affectionate, a gentleman. I respect the mother
who has such a son."

Certainly praise was rare upon Darrell's lips; but when he did praise, he
knew how to do it! And no man will ever command others who has not by
nature that gift! It cannot be learned. Art and experience can only
refine its expression.




CHAPTER XIII.

He who sees his heir in his own child, carries his eye over hopes and
possessions lying far beyond his gravestone, viewing his life, even here,
as a period but closed with a comma. He who sees his heir in another
man's child, sees the full stop at the end of the sentence.

Lionel's departure was indefinitely postponed; nothing more was said of
it. Meanwhile Darrell's manner towards him underwent a marked change.
The previous indifference the rich kinsman had hitherto shown as to the
boy's past life, and the peculiarities of his intellect and character,
wholly vanished. He sought now, on the contrary, to plumb thoroughly the
more hidden depths which lurk in the nature of every human being, and
which, in Lionel, were the more difficult to discern from the vivacity