son's talk the fact that they existed and held fizzy compounds which
would kill you, if you drank them. Perhaps her analogy was all the
better for her lack of specific knowledge. In any case, she saw and
feared the effervescence. The sausages and the white bowl of hot fat
gravy were so much carefully considered bait to lure her son back into
the paths of orthodox uprightness. While they were being
swallowed--slowly, by reason of their mussiness--she had certain things
she wished to say to him.

To her extreme surprise, Scott said them first to her.

"Mother," he said, a little bit imperiously considering his age; "no
matter now about Catie. I want to talk to you about--"

"About?" she queried nervously, while he hesitated under what obviously
was a pretext of picking out the brownest sausage.

"About--myself."

Her nervousness increased.

"Take some more gravy, Scott," she urged him hurriedly. "You'd better
dip it on your bread as soon as you can; it gets cold so soon, these
winter mornings."

But he ignored the spoon she offered him. When he spoke, it was with a
curious hesitation.

"Mother, did I tell you what Professor Mansfield said?"

"Yes."

"Weren't you glad--just a very little?" His tone was boyish in its
pleading.

Mrs. Brenton's answer was evasive.

"Of course, Scott. I am always glad, when your teachers speak well of
you," she said.

"Yes; but think of it," he urged impatiently. "I hate to brag, mother;
but do you take in all he meant: that he saw no reason, if I kept on,
that I should not make a record as a chemist?"

While he spoke, his gray eyes were fixed on her imploringly. Under some
conditions and in some connections, she would have been swift to read
in them the text of his unspoken prayer; but not now. Her ancestral
tendencies forbade: those and the doubts which centred in her son's
other heritage, less orthodox and far, far less under the domination of
the spiritual. Now and then the boy looked like his father,
astoundingly like, and disturbingly. This was one of the times.

Across his young enthusiasm, her answer fell like a wet linen sheet.

"But are you going to keep on?"

He tried to regain his former accent.

"That is what I want to decide, right now," he said as buoyantly as he
was able. "Of course, it isn't just what I started out to do; but he
seemed to feel it was my chance, and you and I, both of us, have been
used to taking any chance that came. What do you think