"No holidays, son? Why you had two last week, when you all went out to Stemmer's Run," she said, looking up into his face, his hand still in hers.
"Yes, but that was fishing!" he laughed as he waved an imaginary rod in his hands.
"And the week before, when you spent the day at Uncle Tilghman's?" she continued, smiling sadly at him, but with the light of an ill-concealed admiration on her face.
"Ah, but mother, I went to see the Lely! That's an education. Oh, that portrait in pink!" He was serious now, looking straight down into her eyes--talking with his hands, one thumb in air as if it were a bit of charcoal and he was outlining the Lely on an equally real canvas. "Such color, mother--such an exquisite poise of the head and sweep to the shoulder--" and the thumb described a curve in the air as if following every turn of Lely's brush.
Her eyes followed his gestures--she loved his enthusiasm, although she wished it had been about something else.
"And you don't get any education out of the Judge's law-books?"
"No, I wish I did." The joyous look on his face was gone now--his hand had fallen to his side. "It gets to be more of a muddle every day--" and then he added, with the illogical reasoning of youth--"all the lawyers that ever lived couldn't paint a picture like the Lely."
Mrs. Horn closed her eyes. It was on her tongue to tell him she knew what was in his heart, but she stopped; no, not to-night, she said firmly to herself, and shut her lips tight--a way she had of bracing her nerves in such emergencies.
Oliver in turn saw the expression of anxiety that crossed his mother's face and the thin drawn line of the lips. One word from her and he would have poured out his heart. Then some shadow that crossed her face silenced him. "No, not to-night--" he said to himself. "She has been sitting up for me and is tired--I'll tell her to-morrow."
"Don't go with Tom Pitts, my son," she said, calmly.
"I'd rather you'd stay; I don't want you to go this time. Perhaps a little later--" and a slight shiver went through her as she rose from her chair and moved toward him.
He made no protest. Her final word was always law to him--not because she dominated him, but because his nature was always to be in harmony with the thing he loved. Because, too, underneath it all was that quality of tenderness to all women old and young, which forbade him to cause one of them pain.
Almost unconsciously to himself he had gone through a process by which from having yielded her the obedience of a child, he now surrendered to her the pleasures of his youth when the old feeling of maternal dominance still controlled her in her attitude to him. She did not recognize the difference, and he had but half-perceived it, but the difference had already transformed him from a boy into a man, though with unrecognized powers of stability as yet.
In obeying his mother, then at twenty-two, or even in meeting the whims and conceits of his sweethearts, this quality of tenderness to the woman was always uppermost in his heart. The surrender of a moment's pleasure seemed so little to him compared to the expression of pain he could see cross their faces.
He had so much to make him happy--what mattered it if out of a life so full he should give up any one thing to please his mother.
Patting him on the cheek and kissing him on the neck, as she had so often done when some sudden wave of affection overwhelmed her, she bade him good-night at last.
Once outside in the old-fashioned hall, she stopped for a moment, her eyes fixed on the floor, the light from the hall-lamp shining on her silver hair and the shawl about her shoulders, and said slowly to herself, as if counting each word:
"What--can I do--to save this boy--from--himself?"
