solitude to await the interview, to avoid which he would
gladly have blown out his brains.

She came to him at last, a long, lean woman who had bent a stubborn
back to many sorrows. A meek, unsubdued woman. The lankiness of limb,
and the lankness of feature and hair, sufficiently pleasing in poor
Ted, stretched forth at his long length yonder, were not such agreeable
characteristics in the mother. Narrow face--narrow nature. In the thin
features, contracted nostrils, close, small mouth, Dan might have read
poor hope for Kitty.

"I have taken his jewellery," she said in her toneless voice. "I
thought it best not to leave it about in a lodging-house. I miss a
ring--a ring I gave him on his last birthday. Can you tell me where it
is?"

She spread the watch, the chain, the sleeve-links, a certain pearl stud
which Dan had noticed once or twice in his shirt when poor Gunton wore
dress clothes, upon the table--all the poor, invaluable trifles which
had lain on the drawers in that pathetic little heap bequeathed to the
dead man's friend. "The ring is missing, you see," she said. She tied
up the articles in a spare white handkerchief and slipped them into the
pocket of her dress.

"Everything of his has become doubly precious to me," she said.
"Perhaps you will be so good as to make inquiries about the ring."

Dan roused himself. Here was his opportunity. "I think the ring----" he
began. "I think he gave the ring to Kitty, you know--the girl he was
engaged to," he got out.

"Engaged?" the lady repeated. "My boy engaged--and without my
knowledge!"

"We don't tell our mothers everything, I'm afraid," Dan said. He made a
ghastly attempt to smile, to get back to his habitual easy manner which
had forsaken him. "'Twouldn't be for our mothers' peace of mind----"

She interrupted him with cold dislike. "I know nothing of you and your
mother," she said. "I know that there was perfect confidence between my
son and me."

It was hard, after that, to tell her the story, but he told it, and saw
her narrow face change from its frozen grieving to a still more frozen
anger. She would not believe, or she affected not to believe, the
story. A girl out of a little country shop to _marry_--her boy!

"You have no right to take away his character so, and he not here to
defend himself!" she said. "He--I perceive that he has consorted with
low company since he has been here; but he is a gentleman--my son, by
birth and education."

"He _