house, with the
resolve not to return to it so long as his father lived.

Whither he had gone, for a long time was unknown. His mother wept,
so did Mehetabel. The old man put on an assumption of indifference,
was short and ungracious to his wife. He was constrained to engage
a man to do the farm work hitherto imposed upon Iver, and this
further tended to embitter him against his rebellious son. He
resented having to expend money when for so long he had enjoyed
the work of Iver free of cost.

The boy's pride prevented him from writing home till he had secured
himself a position in which he could maintain himself. When he did
communicate with Thursley, it was through Mehetabel, because Simon
had forbidden any allusion to the truant boy, and Mrs. Verstage was
not herself much of a scholar, and did not desire unnecessarily to
anger her husband by having letters in his handwriting come to her
by the post.

Years passed, during which the landlady's heart ached for her son:
and as she might not speak of him to Simon, she made a confidant
of Mehetabel.

Thus, the old woman and the girl were drawn closer together, and
Mehetabel glowed with the thought that she was loved by the hostess
as though she were her own daughter.

To talk about the absent one was the great solace of Susanna
Verstage's life. There ever gnawed at her heart the worm of
bereavement from the child in whom her best affections, her
highest pride, her sole ambitions were placed. It may be questioned
whether, without the sympathetic ear and heart of Mehetabel into
which to pour her troubles and to which to confide her hopes, the
woman would not have deteriorated into a hard-hearted virago.

Her love to Simon, never very hot, had dried up. He had wounded
her to the quick in unpardonable fashion in driving her only child
out of the house, and all for the sake of a two-penny-ha'penny
signboard.

Throughout her work she schemed, she thought for Iver; she toiled
and endured in the tavern only to amass a competence for him. She
clung to the place only because she trusted some day he would
return to it, and because every corner was sweet with recollections
of him.

When not at work she dreamed, waking or sleeping, and all her
dreams were of him. She built castles in the air--all occupied
by him. She had but one hope: to meet her son again. All her
activities, all her thoughts, all her aspirations, all her prayers
were so many lines focussing on one point, a