any implication of the dependence in which she had languished; and her mother submitted again.  Boyne was not sorry; there had always been hours of the night when he felt the need of getting at his mother for reassurance as to forebodings which his fancy conjured up to trouble him in the wakeful dark.  It was understood that he might freely do this, and though the judge inwardly fretted, he could not deny the boy the comfort of his mother’s encouraging love.  Boyne’s visits woke him, but he slept the better for indulging in the young nerves that tremor from impressions against which the old nerves are proof.  But now, in the strange fatality which seemed to involve him, Boyne could not go to his mother.  It was too weirdly intimate, even for her; besides, when he had already tried to seek her counsel she had ignorantly repelled him.

The night after his day in The Hague, when he could bear it no longer, he put on his dressing-gown and softly opened Ellen’s door, awake, Ellen?” he whispered.

“Yes, What is it, Boyne” her gentle voice asked.

“He came and sat down by her bed and stole his hand into hers, which she put out to him.  The watery moonlight dripped into the room at the edges of the shades, and the long wash of the sea made itself regularly heard on the sands.

“Can’t you sleep?” Ellen asked again.  “Are you homesick?”

“Not exactly that.  But it does seem rather strange for us to be off here so far, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, I don’t see how I can forgive myself for making you come,” said Ellen, but her voice did not sound as if she were very unhappy.

“You couldn’t help it,” said Boyne, and the words suggested a question to him.  “Do you believe that such things are ordered, Ellen?”

“Everything is ordered, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so.  And if they are, we’re not, to blame for what happens.”

“Not if we try to do right.”

“Of course.  The Kentons always do that,” said Boyne, with the faith in his family that did not fail him in the darkest hour.  “But what I mean is that if anything comes on you that you can’t foresee and you can’t get out of—­” The next step was not clear, and Boyne paused.  He asked,

“Do you think that we can control our feelings, Ellen?”

“About what?”

“Well, about persons that we like.”  He added, for safety, “Or dislike.”

“I’m afraid not,” said Ellen, sadly, “We ought to like persons and dislike them for some good reason, but we don’t.”

“Yes, that’s what I mean,” said Borne, with a long breath.  “Sometimes it seems like a kind of possession, doesn’t it?”

“It seems more like that when we like them,” Ellen said.

“Yes, that’s what I mean.  If a person was to take a fancy to some one that was above him, that was richer, or older, he wouldn’t be to blame for it, would he?”

“Was that what you wanted to ask me about?”