felt justified in prying into my
affairs.

When June arrived, however, my tutor began to show signs that his
conscience was troubling him, and one night he delivered his ultimatum.
The joke had gone far enough, he implied. My intentions, indeed, he
found praiseworthy, but in his opinion it was high time that my father
were informed of them; he was determined to call at my father's office.

The next morning was blue with the presage of showers; blue, too,
with the presage of fate. An interminable morning. My tasks had become
utterly distasteful. And in the afternoon, so when I sat down to make
out invoices, I wrote automatically the names of the familiar customers,
my mind now exalted by hope, now depressed by anxiety. The result of
an interview perhaps even now going on would determine whether or no I
should be immediately released from a slavery I detested. Would Mr.
Wood persuade my father? If not, I was prepared to take more desperate
measures; remain in the grocery business I would not. In the evening,
as I hurried homeward from the corner where the Boyne Street car had
dropped me, I halted suddenly in front of the Peters house, absorbing
the scene where my childhood had been spent: each of these spreading
maples was an old friend, and in these yards I had played and dreamed.
An unaccountable sadness passed over me as I walked on toward our
gate; I entered it, gained the doorway of the house and went upstairs,
glancing into the sitting room. My mother sat by the window, sewing. She
looked up at me with an ineffable expression, in which I read a trace of
tears.

"Hugh!" she exclaimed.

I felt very uncomfortable, and stood looking down at her.

"Why didn't you tell us, my son?" In her voice was in truth reproach;
yet mingled with that was another note, which I think was pride.

"What has father said?" I asked.

"Oh, my dear, he will tell you himself. I--I don't know--he will talk to
you."

Suddenly she seized my hands and drew me down to her, and then held
me away, gazing into my face with a passionate questioning, her
lips smiling, her eyes wet. What did she see? Was there a subtler
relationship between our natures than I guessed? Did she understand by
some instinctive power the riddle within me? divine through love the
force that was driving me on she knew not whither, nor I? At the sound
of my father's step in the hall she released me. He came in as though
nothing had happened.

"Well, Hugh, are you ho