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selves to their work. Mothers had to be pushed aside for the time being. Oh, yes, she would understand. That was the wonderful part of her. The wistful gray eyes would look adoringly at him as they always had. He was going to her. Perhaps she would come back with him, and the rest of the world could go to the devil. His mind was made up at last. He would go at once. He looked at his watch. There was still time to catch an evening train. It was Friday. He would cut his Saturday coachings, spend the weekend with her, persuade her to give up the shop, and bring her back with him.

He disappeared into his bedroom and hastily packed a few clothes in his bag. At the door he ran into WyckhamSmith, who looked singularly distraught and miserable.

"Oh, I say," said Walton, "I have " he choked on the words and began again. "Your poem, you know."

"Don't!" pleaded Wyckham-Smith. "I was a damned blackguard and I ought to be shot. I don't know how I could have done such a thing.”

"It hurt, as it was no doubt meant to," said Walton, slowly, as if measuring off his words, "but don't retract now. There was something really heroic in your doing it. It did not come easy. I know you enough for that. And," he added, "there was no reason why you should have signed your name. The poem would have done its deadly work just the same. That was really brave and independent." He held out his hand.

Per

But Wyckham-Smith turned away. "I don't deserve it, sir." The generosity of the man overcame him. haps his hero had fallen momentarily in his estimation, but only to rise higher than ever. Walton flushed slightly. This was a tribute he had not expected, and it helped to soothe the wound that had been inflicted.

"I was about to say, WyckhamSmith, I shall have to cut your coaching to-morrow, as I am taking the evening train to London." It needed no great intuition to guess his errand. "But if you will come on Monday at three we will have the coaching here, and tea afterward."

"Thank you, sir." Wyckham-Smith's voice had lost its bored drawl and was a little hoarse and uncertain. For a moment the gray eyes met the brown, a dog-like devotion in the one, a sad understanding in the other.

IT was the steepest hill in Highgate. The little yellow tram, blazing with light, was grinding out all its power, ready for the final pull, when the conductor clanged his bell. The car leaped forward, sprang back again, fairly vibrated with indecision. Then it rasped to a dead stop. Walton, bag in hand, dismounted. For a moment he stood looking down the hill. A few lights twinkled brightly on each side of the road as far as the eye could reach, while far below was a whitish blur like illuminated fog, where London shone for a still busy world. Off in the direction of Hampstead Heath the sky was tinged with rose-color and the air was full of the pungent smell of burning leaves.

A hundred scenes of his boyhood came back to him with a rush. He felt like a traveler returning to his home after many years. And in a sense he was, for in sympathies he had been growing far away from his home. He made his way toward a quaint stucco house with one gable. There was no light in the front of the building, but a street lamp caught the golden letters, F. G. Walton, on a sign-board above the door.

Slowly

he swung open the low, wooden gate, and skirted around to the side of the shop by a narrow path that hugged an old ivy-covered wall.

As he made the turn to the house, the soft light from a rose-colored lamp in the window, his own present to his mother, fell across his path. He paused and looked in. What he saw was not the small, simply furnished room, with the tables and chairs in their neat linen covers, and a few conventional pictures, but a faded little woman, dressed in black, with a sweet, patient face, a tiny cap covering her scanty gray locks. She was leaning back in one of the chairs, her hands lying in her lap. Her eyes had the far-away look of a dreamer, to whom time and space are nothing. She looked very fragile and alone. Walton felt a lump in his throat. Irresistibly

Wyckham-Smith's refrain forced itself tiny strand of lavender in the gray upon him: homespun of his coat.

Her head ached, and her back ached. But

her heart was full of pride.

"I've a son in Oxford town, He's a man of great renown, He's a don in cap and gown."

Quickly he let himself in at the door and, almost before his mother had time to turn, was kneeling at her side.

"Mother! my own little Mother!"

"It 's Graham!" she said, and with the words her face lighted with eagerness and pleasure. She was all animation. "And 'ow you made my 'eart jump!" Her "h's" almost always went in moments of excitement. She drew his head to her breast, while her hands wandered lovingly over the mouse-brown hair to that one reactionary lock, which she smoothed with soft, caressing fingers, just as she had done ever since he was a small boy in an Eton jacket. She almost crooned over it.

For a moment neither spoke. Then Walton gently disengaged himself, and brought from a far corner of the room a plain oak footstool, which he placed by her side, and sat down. He looked up at her wistfully, even as she was looking down at him. The first words of greeting were over. Walton had said that he intended to stay two long, restful days at home. Then he added:

"Mother, when I was a little chap I always thought there was a magic about this footstool. I thought I had only to sit upon it and you would have to do anything I asked of you."

"My foolish lad," she murmured, "have n't I always done what you asked?"

"Poor old mother," said Walton, taking one of the soft old hands in his, "so you have, and it seems as if I had always been objecting to what you wanted to do." She was very still, listening intently. "And now I 've come to take you away from your beloved shop. Can you bear it?”

"But, Graham," she gasped, with a nervous intake of breath, "what do you mean?" Her gray eyes watched him anxiously. There was something almost akin to fear in them. "What do you mean, dear?" She plucked at a

"I mean, Mother mine," Graham held her hand more tightly, "that I'm beastly lonely up there in Oxford, and I want you to come and make a home for me." His eyes were very wistful now. She looked at him, only half comprehending.

"Me?" she parried, and from pure gratification blushed swiftly and vividly, till the years slipped from her, and she looked, despite her gray hair and sixty years, like a flustered girl. But impossible though the idea was to her, she wanted to play with it. “Why, I almost died of fright the other day when the Lord Mayor stopped in to buy some pencils. And dear knows that he 's no scholar that a body should mind. Whatever should I do in Oxford, where they are all scholars?" She looked at him pleadingly, wanting reassurance and yet dreading it.

For a moment a flicker of amusement crossed Walton's face. He could visualize his timid little mother fluttering about the mayor.

"But the mayor won't come to my rooms," he said, "and as for any scholars, it would do them good to talk to you and discover that mind was n't created by books. I'd travel far if I had your mind." (This from her brilliant Graham!) "And I'm lonely." Wisely he did n't argue that she was tired and that it would be good for her to give up the shop. He knew that her health and her own interests were arguments that she would not listen to. So deliberately he made the selfish appeal.

She was shaken and gratified to the point of tears. It seemed as if she had lived for this moment. All the years of loneliness and labor were being repaid a hundredfold. Her Graham, her own little boy, grown now to an Oxford scholar, had come to her and said he needed her.

"O Graham!" she said, and the tears rolled down her flushed cheeks and on the rough sleeve. He wanted her, and God knew that ought to be enough; but quite apart from her diffidence, which made her shrink almost with terror at the idea of being thrown with a crowd of strangers, all scholars, would it be

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the best thing for him and his chances in the world? What he needs, she thought, is a wife who can help him hold his position, rather than a mother who can give him little more than the comforts of home.

Even if she could believe there was some truth in what Graham said about her mind, she still shrank from committing herself, lest she should do what was not best for him. But he was lonely! He had said so twice. And the maternal watchfulness in her was on the qui vive. Then the memory of something that had happened last summer came to her, and with it a flash of intuition. But Graham was waiting to be answered.

"If it seems best," she said finally, "I'll come. But wait, dear, till January. I'd half planned to give up the shop then, anyhow, and go to live with old Mrs. Brown, who is all alone now, you know. But if you want me, of course I'll come. I'd want to come. But be sure, Graham dear! It may be only that you are lonely." She hesitated. "What you really need is a wife." Her eyes were wistful, but there was no trace in them of jealousy. "Are there no girls in Oxford good enough for my boy?" The question was asked with tender banter, but there was seriousness in it.

"Good enough, yes," said Walton,

"but none that have any use for me." Try as he would, he could not keep the bitterness out of his voice.

"Now I was thinking," said his mother, with the cunning air of a strategist about to pull off a master-stroke, "of a young lady that came here and bought some of my dressed dolls. She was from Oxford. I told her how I had a son there. She said she knew you." She did n't add, though it was on the tip of her tongue, "And she blushed crimson when she said it." Instead, after a moment's hesitation she said, "She was a sweet girl."

Walton had sprung involuntarily to his feet. His face was turned from his mother, but she had found out his secret. The trouble was a girl.

"Was it Dorothy Pelham?" he asked in a strained voice.

"She said I was n't to tell you she came," replied Mrs. Walton, without assent or denial. But Walton had had his answer. He understood. Dorothy had known for months. No wonder she despised him. He must think it all out now, at once. He turned.

"Mother," he said, stooping over her and kissing her, "I'm dog-tired, and I'm going to bed, and I want you to go, too."

Mrs. Walton yearned to ask more, to comfort, but her innate delicacy kept her silent. Walton caught the look, but it was not until he reached the door that he could answer it. Then with a slight tremor in his voice he said:

"Mother, I want you to know that Dorothy Pelham would not look at me if I were the last man on earth. Now, will you come?"

"Yes, my son," answered Mrs. Walton in a barely audible voice. If Graham wanted her like that, he should have her just as soon as she could dispose of her little shop, which for many years had been both husband and son to her.

Walton ran up the dark, narrow stairs to the large attic room he had always occupied as a boy. He lit the gas. It was coolly papered with appleblossoms on a white background. His bed was just where it used to stand under the sloping eaves, and beside it was an old-fashioned chest of drawers. Opposite, by the window looking out

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St. Mary's like a frozen flame
Leaps sunwards; while her studious train
Of spires and towers along the plain
Stand praying round her, like a court
In silent adoration.

Bed was far from his thoughts. He sat down by the table, and step by step reviewed the happenings of the last days. So Dorothy knew, and the end, as far as he and she were concerned, had come some time back. How she must have hated and despised him when she found him unwilling to talk about his home! Innumerable openings that she had no doubt intentionally introduced into the conversation came back to him, but he had refused to take any of them.

It was folly to try to end what was already ended, he reflected, but he felt as if he must at least say good-by. She could not grudge him that. He fumbled in the drawer for writing materials, and then, as if in a hideous nightmare, he wrote:

My dear Miss Pelham:

I am glad that you have met my mother. For having seen her, you must realize that the pettiness in me, the desire to make the outer show stand for inner greatness, are things quite alien to her. As you have reason to know, I could not have said that a short time ago. But perhaps if I enclose "Fairest Adonis," a poem written by one of my students, you will understand what has brought me to myself. You will realize the force of it more when I tell you that it was written not by a man who disliked me, but by one who thought me a rather decent sort. I have betrayed the trust and confidence of my friends, but my mother's sweet humility, or perhaps her fine simplicity, has made her blind to my failings. My chief wish now is to bring her back to Oxford and justify as far as possible her faith in me.

Of course I realize the impossibility of your ever caring for me as I had hoped you might some day. In the circumstances I

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He did not, could not, read it over. He folded the poem and slipped it into an envelop. He felt he could not rest until it was mailed. Lest he disturb his mother, he took off his shoes, and quietly stole down-stairs, let himself out the door, and hurried to the corner post. Then as quietly he stole back to his room, while behind her closed door his mother knelt by her bed, listening to the stealthy footsteps, and longing with all the intensity of her soul to find some way to comfort him.

The week-end passed. There was an idyllic Saturday at the zoo, and a Sunday in London, with a morning service in the abbey, and an afternoon when they wandered arm in arm like lovers along the embankment. Dorothy's name was not mentioned again.

Monday morning Walton packed his bag, and in the cold, gray drizzle of a windy day made his way back to Oxford. The usual high-priced cabby drove him back in the usual drafty hansom to his college rooms. He found Scroggs, his scout, lighting the fire in his grate.

The kindly, wrinkled old servant cast one look at his master's white, exhausted face, and hobbled off for coffee.

Walton sat down by the fire, trying to prepare himself for that day and the days and days to come. The blaze had warmed him a little, and a suggestion of color had come back to his face when Scroggs returned with a large tray neatly set with white-and-gold dishes, with coffee, toast, and jam.

"Ere, sir," he said, "that ought ta put 'eart into you. And 'ere's the post, sir, 'as just came."

Walton took the tray indifferently.

Why, that was Dorothy's writing on the little, square, gray envelop. His mind failed to conjure up any probable explanation. With trembling fingers he tore open the letter. He almost wished she had not written. It would have been easier. He read: My dear Mr. Walton:

I did not care for the poem you sent me, and am writing another I like better. Come around if you care to hear it. It is called "Dearest Adonis."

Always yours,

DOROTHY PELHAM.

FOR a second time Walton cut Wyckham-Smith's coaching.

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