.

On their arrival in America Ronald took Maurice to his southern home,
where he was received with a cordial hospitality that strengthened and
confirmed the tie of brotherhood between the young men.

We will not attempt to portray the meeting between Ronald and his
parents,--a meeting so full of joy that its throbs quickened into the
pulse of pain, as though clay-compassed hearts were hardly large enough
to endure the ecstasy of such a reunion. Nor will we dwell upon the
proud elation with which Ronald's first ambitious attempt in art was
contemplated by his parents. Their praises might simply have testified
that love appreciates; the hand that wrought might have sanctified even
a feeble work to their sight; but colder judgments pronounced Ronald's
initiatory achievement a pledge of power, and all the more decisive
because the execution of the youthful hand obviously had not kept pace
with the strong conception of the fervid brain.

We pass on to the effect produced upon Maurice by his sojourn in
Ronald's transatlantic home.

Many a pang did the youthful Frenchman endure as he noted the thorough
and genial understanding which seemed to exist between the southern
youth and his father. Maurice was amazed by Mr. Walton's unfailing
recognition that his son was a responsible being; by the confidence he
reposed in him; by the unequivocal manner in which he placed him upon a
footing of equality, even while guiding him by his counsels,--counsels
offered as the results of a larger experience, yet never so compulsorily
urged as to check his son's freedom of decision. Maurice, marked, too,
the earnest interest with which Mr. Walton entered into all Ronald's
projects, albeit some of them appeared too wild and high-reaching to be
easy of accomplishment; beheld how readily the paternal hand was
stretched out to soften the ordeals through which the neophyte must
inevitably pass, and was moved by the touching frankness with which the
noble-minded parent repeatedly congratulated himself that he had not
permitted his own predilections to force Ronald into a field of action
repugnant to his tastes.

When Maurice instinctively compared this liberal, high-toned father's
mode of influencing his son with the tyrannous control of the haughty
count, and contrasted Ronald's untrammeled position with his own state
of dependent nonentity, he felt that unstruggling submission to the
cruel decree which doomed him to waste those fresh, strong