Page:The Father Confessor, Stories of Danger and Death.djvu/173

Rh him without feeling when one day he discovered her in tears, and did not speak to her; he had stood before her in silence, then gone away. The truth was the boy was too shocked to speak. Mother in tears! What sort of terrible trouble was there to make a grown-up person weep? They did not cry for any of the griefs he had. This was something he could not approach, comfort, or understand. He stood terrified, dumb, before her, and left her, to cry by himself for hours outside alone.

When he was seventeen he fell in love with the gate-keeper's daughter, and he sought an interview with his mother. She listened with impatience as he stammered the story. "Kind seeks kind," she muttered. "It is all I expected." She did not reason or argue with him, but simply sent the girl away. And the boy had to conquer his heart alone. Only once had she spoken to him upon the subject; it was to say if he wished to marry the girl when he was of age he could, that it probably would be a suitable match for him then. The lad did not know how to receive the speech—whether as a concession or as an insult—but he