“Oh!” exclaimed the Colonel.
“I told her she ought not to have done so,” went on Mrs. Barrimore, “unless I had been with her. But Philip is a safe friend for her. Poor Philip! he will never get over the loss of Eweretta!”
“I don’t know so much about that,” the Colonel affirmed. “In these days young folks don’t love as faithfully as when I was young. I question if real love ever comes to the very young nowadays—lasting love.”
Mrs. Barrimore’s cheeks flushed with that delicate pink at these words.
Colonel Lane saw the color come and go, and loved her the more for the pure heart which made those pretty blushes possible at her age. It was this purity of nature which more than anything else kept Mrs. Barrimore so young. Her grey eyes were as guileless as a child’s.
She answered hastily as if to ward off more intimate words.
“Oh, but Philip is not like others,” she said. “He never was, even as a child.”
Colonel Lane agreed. No, Philip was not like other men, he acknowledged, but mentally he judged it good for the others that he was not. Philip, in his opinion, was upright and honorable, but conceited and arrogant. It galled the Colonel not a little to note the way in which this young man patronized and criticized and ordered his beautiful mother.
Perhaps she had been weak in her boy’s early years. She had been too fond, too kind and indulgent. But Philip grown to be a man ought to understand and recompense her love better.
The Colonel was too wise, however, to ventilate his views on Philip to his mother.