"You are generous, and I never knew you to do a meanly selfish thing in your life. And yet your point of danger is selfishness of a kind. I have observed you from infancy, and this is what I have seen. Your desire to accomplish your purposes is too strong. You are not held back by any difficulty. You make any sacrifice in pursuit of your ends. You use any means you can find to carry your plans through, and you are quick at finding means, or making them when you want them.
"I was proud of the pluck you showed in doing almost a slave's work for two years, because you had made up your mind to go through college. But I shuddered at the thought of what such determination might lead to.
"Oh! my son, you will succeed in life. I have no fear of that. But how? Beware the time when your purpose is strong, your desire to succeed great, and the only means at command are dishonest and degrading. That time will come to you, be sure. When it comes you must make a hard choice—harder for you than for another. You will then sacrifice a purpose that it will seem like death to surrender—or you will commit moral suicide! I shall not live to see you so tried; but if I see you practise giving up a little and trying to keep guard at this weak place, I may learn before I die to think of that hour of your trial without the foreboding it gives me now."
That letter was the last his mother ever sent him. It had been a consolation to him that before death summoned her, she had at least read his reply, assuring her of his determination to maintain his integrity in all circumstances.
"You say truly," he wrote, "that I never surrender a purpose or fail to carry it out. Reflect, mother dear, that the strongest purpose I ever had is this—to preserve my character. I will not fail to find means for that when the time comes, as I never fail to accomplish objects of less moment."
"The prophecy of the dear old mother is fulfilled," he muttered, while his nails buried themselves in his unconscious palms. "The time she foresaw has come, and I have committed suicide. Thank God the mother did not live to see! Thank God her vision was no clearer! She had hope for me at least. She did not know."
III.
As he called up pictures there in the dark, Edgar Braine saw himself a little country boy in Southern Indiana, growing strong in the sweet, wholesome air of the river and the hills, and torturing his young mind with questions to which he could not comprehend the answers.
At first his questioning had to do with nature, whose wonders lay around him. He wanted to know of the river. Whence it came, and how; he asked Wherefore, of the hills; he made friends of all growing things, and companions of those that had conscious life.