“I shall not interfere with your conscience in this matter, Robert; and my own feelings, American as I am by birth and family, rather incline me to think as you think.  I have wished to see you, my son, on a different business.”

“Do not keep me in suspense, mother; I feel like a prisoner who is waiting to hear his charges read.  What have I done?”

“Nay, it is rather for you to tell me what you have done.  You cannot have forgotten, Robert, how very anxious I have been to awaken and keep alive family affection, among my children; how very important both your father and I have always deemed it; and how strongly we have endeavoured to impress this importance on all your minds.  The tie of family, and the love it ought to produce, is one of the sweetest of all our earthly duties.  Perhaps we old people see its value more than you young; but, to us, the weakening of it seems like a disaster only a little less to be deplored than death.”

“Dearest—­dearest mother!  What can you—­what do you mean?—­What can I—­what can Maud have to do with this?”

“Do not your consciences tell you, both?  Has there not been some misunderstanding—­perhaps a quarrel—­certainly a coldness between you?  A mother has a quick and a jealous eye; and I have seen, for some time, that there is not the old confidence, the free natural manner, in either of you, that there used to be, and which always gave your father and me so much genuine happiness.  Speak, then, and let me make peace between you.”

Robert Willoughby would not have looked at Maud, at that moment, to have been given a regiment; as for Maud, herself, she was utterly incapable of raising her eyes from the floor.  The former coloured to the temples, a proof of consciousness, his mother fancied; while the latter’s face resembled ivory, as much as flesh and blood.

“If you think, Robert,” continued Mrs. Willoughby, “that Maud has forgotten you, or shown pique for any little former misunderstanding, during your last absence, you do her injustice.  No one has done as much for you, in the way of memorial; that beautiful sash being all her own work, and made of materials purchased with her own pocket-money.  Maud loves you truly, too; for, whatever may be the airs she gives herself, while you are together, when absent, no one seems to care more for your wishes and happiness, than that very wilful and capricious girl.”

“Mother!—­mother!” murmured Maud, burying her face in both her hands.

Mrs. Willoughby was woman in all her feelings, habits and nature.  No one would have been more keenly alive to the peculiar sensibilities of her sex, under ordinary circumstances, than herself; but she was now acting and thinking altogether in her character of a mother; and so long and intimately had she regarded the two beings before her, in that common and sacred light, that it would have been like the dawn of a new existence for her, just then, to look upon them as not really akin to each other.