usion of them, and at the same time
was more than vaguely conscious on the other side of a certain steady
white light which attracted towards another goal. He walked on in
meditative musing, slowly and carelessly, not knowing where he was
going nor what he passed on the way; till he had walked far. And then
he suddenly stopped, turned, and set out to go back the road he had
come, but now with a quick, measured, steady footfall which gave no
indication of a vacillating mind or a laboured question.

He went into the breakfast-room when he got home, which was also the
common sitting-room and where he found, as he expected, his mother
alone. She looked anxious; which was not a usual thing with Mrs. Dallas.

'Pitt, my dear!--out all this time? Are you not very hot?'

'I do not know, mother; I think not. I have not thought about the heat,
I believe.'

He had kept the honeysuckle sprays in his hand all this while, and he
now went forward to stick them in the huge jar which occupied the
fireplace, and which was full of green branches. Turning when he had
done this, he did not draw up a chair, but threw himself down upon the
rug at his mother's feet, so that he could lay back his head upon her
knees. Presently he put up his two hands behind him and found her
hands, which he gently drew down and laid on each side of his head,
holding them there in caressing fashion. Caresses were never the order
of the day in this family; rarely exchanged even between mother and
son, who yet were devoted faithfully to each other. The action moved
Mrs. Dallas greatly; she bent down over him and kissed her son's brow,
and then loosening one of her hands thrust it fondly among the thick
brown wavy locks of hair that were such a pride to her. She admired him
unqualifiedly, with that blissful delight in him which a good mother
gives to her son, if his bodily and mental properties will anyway allow
of it. Mrs. Dallas's pride in this son had always been satisfied and
unalloyed; all the more now was the chagrin she felt at the first jar
to this satisfaction. Her face showed both feelings, the pride and the
trouble, but for a time she kept silence. She was burning to discuss
further with him the subject of the morning; devoured with restless
curiosity as to how it could ever have got such a lodgment in Pitt's
mind; at the same time she did not know how to touch it, and was afraid
of touching it wrong. Her husband's counsel, _not to talk_, she did not