“You will tell me this trouble — now — before you leave me? You must, dear boy.” He took the hand she put out to him, and held it in silence; then, incoherently, in a voice humbled and low, — almost lost in the rumbling of the carriage, — he told her. It was a revelation of the soul, and as the mother listened she too suffered and wept, but did not relent.

Cassandra’s cry, “I am a strangah!” sounded in her ears, but her sorrow was for her son. Yes, she was a stranger, and had wisely taken herself back to her own place; what else could she do? Was it not in the nature of a Providence that David had been delayed until after her departure? The duty now devolved upon herself to comfort him without further reproof, but nevertheless to make him see and do his duty in the position he had been called to fill.