“You mean May Churchill?” answered Tom Henderson; “well, I certainly do admire her very much.”
“And—are you engaged to her?”
“No; there are always worries in the way.”
“Not surely—”
“Mother, I may as well tell you that I have made a fool of myself, but I must get out of it.”
“But Tom—”
“There! don’t talk of it like a good old woman; I’ll get out of it, that I’m determined.”
Mrs. Henderson did not say anything more. She walked on with her hand through her son’s arm, feeling very anxious. Tom Henderson had been a wayward boy, and he was a wayward man, and his mother was conscious perhaps that she had spoilt her only child. She had heard a rumor—got one of those painful hints which friends do not scruple to give—about her son’s connection with Elsie Wray of the Wayside Inn. But she had never spoken of it to Tom. She was a delicate-minded woman, and extremely attached to him, and there were subjects on which Mrs. Henderson felt she could not speak to her boy.
The mother and son walked home together and then parted, Mrs. Henderson to see after some household arrangements, Tom to retire to his own room to write a letter to Elsie Wray.
Let us look over his shoulder as he sat, pen in hand, with his black brows knitted and his handsome face distorted with the angry passions in his heart. He began: