"I don't know, mother dear—never ask me—for I don't know it myself." And then he kissed her, and wished her good-night, and left her.
She sat long over her fire, dreaming, by herself, thinking a little, perhaps, of the elder son, and the bride he was going to bring her, whom she should have to welcome whether she liked her or no, but thinking more of the younger, whose inner life she had studied, and who was so entirely dear and precious to her. It was very little to her that he had been extravagant and thoughtless, that he had lost money in betting and racing—these were minor faults—and she and John between them had always managed to meet his difficulties; they had not been, in truth, very tremendous. But for that, he had never caused her one day's anxiety, never given her one instant's pain. "God grant he may get a wife who deserves him," was the mother's prayer that night. "I doubt if Helen be worthy of him; but if he loves her, as I believe he must do, no word of mine shall stand between him and his happiness."
And then she went to bed, and dreamed, as mothers dream of the child they love best.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE MEMBER FOR MEADOWSHIRE.
Honour and shame from no condition rise;
Act well your part, there all the honour lies.
Pope, "Essay on Man."
About five miles from Kynaston Hall, as the crow flies, across the fields, stood, as the house-agents would have described it, "a large and commodious modern mansion, standing in about eighty acres of well-timbered park land."
I do not know that any description that could be given of Shadonake would so well answer to the reality as the above familiar form of words.