BENSON carried with him continually now a sense of hurt; and out of this came a certain subtle change in the very fibre of his love itself. He lost something of the spirit of worship, he seemed to be struggling for dominance. The reserve of his former attitude toward Virginia was lost. Once he had hoped to win her love, now he felt that he must compel it. He always came back to the one rankling conviction that she had been unjust; that she had allowed him to make sacrifices and to do for her in numberless ways she should not have permitted, unless she were willing to accept, not his love necessarily, but the full consequences of their intimacy, since it was perfectly incredible to him that any man could know her as he had known her, and not come to love her; he came to blame her that she had not understood.

It was not unnatural perhaps that the after effect upon Virginia of Benson's declaration was less pronounced than upon himself. Her active anger was of brief duration only, and she soon forgave him his unlucky utterances in remembering his real kindness. She would have liked him to know this; but she was sensible it would be unsafe to show it, and after all, a marked but kindly reserve was only a reasonable precaution. She was sorry for him, and his restrained manner in her presence only tended to deepen her feeling of pity; yet she considered him both a foolish and presumptuous young man.

In the first stress of her emotion she had meditated radical and salutary treatment of him. She had even thought of asking him to retire from the management of the estate; but she had decided that this would be a needless severity. When they met she was ceremoniously kind, but either Jane or Stephen was present. At first Benson had been rather inclined to smile at this; it struck him as being such a distinctly feminine maneuver; but the chaperonage when it was firmly persisted in, ended by becoming rather galling; it argued such a lack of confidence, as well as a fixed unwillingness to allow him to ever again revert to the subject which he had most at heart.

Virginia had found that even Dr. Long's select academy, with its modest fees for tuition, was out of the question; and was forced to send Stephen to the public school. At first Sam West drove him into town each morning, returning for him in the afternoon, and Benson pointed out to Virginia that when the winter actually set in these drives would be rather a hardship for the boy, and proposed that he stay with him when the weather was severe.

“Oh, no, I couldn't think of that!” said Virginia. “He would be such a care to you.”

“You leave that part of it to me, Mrs. Landray,” answered the lawyer good-naturedly.

“And I should miss him dreadfully, and he might be homesick!”

“He probably will be at first; but you'll be sending him off to college presently; this will prepare you both for that time.”

“Well, perhaps, when the roads get very bad indeed.”

After his first experience in town, Stephen carried Virginia such an enthusiastic account of his host's kindness that it won from her a grateful little letter of acknowledgment and thanks.

From the start Benson exerted a certain influence over the boy that was destined to increase with his development. The lawyer was the first man he had known of his own class; all his short life had been passed among women, they had been his companions and friends; and he slowly abandoned the reserve with which he had first met Benson's advances, until finally he talked to him almost as freely as he would have talked to Virginia herself.

If Stephen had never known men, it was equally true that Benson had never known boys, his father having made his own youth a period of the most rigorous industry; he had also been quiet and studiously inclined; the latter a characteristic which he noted Stephen did not appear to possess. He remembered that the boy's father and uncle, while they were educated men, had possessed a much greater respect for books than knowledge of them; and it impressed itself upon him that Stephen was most unlikely material from which to recruit a member of one of the learned professions. In short the boy evinced an utter and astonishing lack of curiosity concerning the lawyers well selected library which had been placed at his disposal. When Benson commented on this fact, Stephen informed him quite frankly that he didn't care for books; he had all the reading he wanted at school.

“How would you like to be a lawyer, Stephen?” Benson asked him on one occasion.

“I shouldn't like it, Mr. Benson,” he said promptly.

“Why not, Stephen?”

“I don't know, only I just know I shouldn't.”

“But you've got to do something,” urged Benson.

“I suppose so,” said the boy slowly. “My Aunt Virginia wants me to be a professional man, but I tell her that is all nonsense.”

“But to please her,” suggested Benson.

“I'd do a good deal to do that, but what I want is something out of doors. And I'd want there should be a great deal of money in it, whatever I did!”

“And if you got a great deal of money what would you do with it?” asked his host.

“Give most of it to my Aunt Virginia, and keep some for myself,” answered Stephen.

“That's a first-rate idea,” said Benson.

“They, my father and uncle, must have had a lot of money once, Mr. Benson.”

“Yes, they did—a fortune.”

The boy frowned.

“Well, I wish it hadn't been lost; then there wouldn't be this talk about my being a professional man. What are all the professions anyway, Mr. Benson?”

“The law, medicine, the ministry—”

“Oh, well, I guess I'll have to argue my Aunt Virginia out of that notion!” he said in evident low spirits.

Stephen was rather good looking and mature for his years. All his ideas, such as they were, were well thought out and definite. He was dark like his father, and had the Landray air of high breeding; indeed, his manner toward Benson was one of courteous and restrained good-fellowship, he was neither boisterous nor familiar; and the lawyer, considering those points which were most in his favour, decided that while in some respects he was only an average boy, he yet possessed certain fine possibilities of manhood, though he was forced to own he did not quite know what they were, and was dubious as to their practical value. He remembered that his father and uncle had both been exceptional men, but he would hardly have called them successful men.

If Benson's opinion of Stephen was not wholly complimentary, no doubt of the boy's capacity or brilliancy ever entered Virginia's mind. He was a Landray, and she was sure he would develop into such a man as his father had been. She felt that the future of the family rested entirely with him, and had her own ideals of what this future must be.

She had so fixed upon a profession for him that he soon ceased to combat the idea, though it was peculiarly distasteful to him; and this distaste grew as he grew, until his apathy on this one point was so great that Virginia's confidence was shaken somewhat; however, during the second winter of his attendance at the public school he delighted her by suggesting the law, since it seemed to him that with Benson's help it could be mastered with rather less personal inconvenience than any other of the professions; and probably it would be all right, but he had his doubts, still to please his aunt he was willing to make the effort; and so the law it became.

The following winter he worried through Humes's “History of England,” and then in very low spirits took up Blackstone, and felt that he was hopelessly committed; but he bravely guarded his speech that she might not know how great a sacrifice he was making.

In his fancy, speculating on his future, he saw himself as he saw Benson, digging away at his desk, among piles of papers, or delving into yellow calfskin volumes; or arguing his cases in the stuffy little court-room; or returning dusty or muddy, according to the season, from the round of the circuit courts; and this cheerless prospect filled him with a secret anguish that time in no wise abated. He did not dare tell any one what he would really have liked to do, which involved leaving home and going West; the life there, as he imagined it was the only kind of life he could think of with any degree of satisfaction. But this he knew could never be for him; so he plodded grimly on in his studies, and while he was not brilliant he wasted no time, but persevered in his uncongenial pursuits with a dogged tenacity that went far to atone for his lack of heart in his work. It would not have been so bad, if he had not felt he was surely building toward a future in which he could take no vital interest.

One day, during his fourth year in school, his teacher was called from the room, and on his return went to Stephen's desk.

“You are wanted, Landray, at home,” he said. “No, there is nothing wrong there,” he added, seeing the startled look on the boy's face. Outside in the hall Stephen found Sam West.

“What is it, Sam?” he asked anxiously.

“I don't know, but your aunt sent me in for you, she wants to see you. Wants you should go back with me right away.”

“But what is it, Sam? You're sure she is not sick?” he persisted, in vague alarm.

“No, she ain't sick; she's all right. I was in town this morning and took a letter out to her; she read it, and sent me in for you; that's all I know about it,” Sam explained.

On reaching home Stephen hurried into the library where he found Virginia waiting for him.

“There is nothing the matter with you, is there, Aunt Virginia?” he questioned anxiously. “You're not sick, are you?”

“Oh, no, dear—were you alarmed?” Virginia asked.

“Well, yes, I was!” he answered. “You see I couldn't make out why you should send for me.”

“Sit down, Stephen. I have heard from Dr. Stillman. Sam brought me the letter two hours ago.” Her manner was very gentle, and the boy saw that her eyes were red as with weeping.

“Is there anything the matter with my mother?” he asked quickly.

“Yes, dear,” said Virginia softly.

“She's sick?”

“Yes, she has been very ill, Stephen.”

He looked up into her face.

“You mean—” he began, with strange hesitancy.

“She is dead, dear. Your mother is dead.”

“Dead?” he repeated. He did not seem to understand. “When did it happen?” he asked at length.

He saw that his aunt expected some show of emotion from him, but he was conscious of no emotion beyond surprise. With the years that had intervened since her going away, his mother's letters had grown less and less frequent. She had long since ceased to write him with any regularity, and when her rare letters did reach him, they had been a burden to him rather than a pleasure. He had not known how to answer them.

“Would you like to see Dr. Stillman's letter?” Virginia asked.

He shook his head.

“No; you tell me what he says,” he replied.

“It is very brief, it was posted over four months ago. She died in upper Burmah, where she said they were going in the last letter we received from her, you remember, dear?”

He nodded slightly.

“It seems that her death was very sudden, a fever of some sort. Aren't you very, very sorry, dear?”

The inadequacy of his emotion, as she felt it, was a shock to her. “Why, yes, of course I am!” he said. “I wish I remembered her better. You'd like me to show a good deal of feeling, wouldn't you? but how can I, when I don't remember her so very well? You're the only mother I've had, you've been a real mother to me! I suppose you feel it more than I do, and you're surprised at it.”

“And you don't remember?” asked Virginia with tender pity; pity for him, and pity for the dead woman.

“Oh, yes, I do, in a way. I remember her saying good-bye and going off in the carriage. I watched her drive away from the hall window up-stairs, and you came to me there, and found me crying, you were crying, too; I remember a lot about her before that, long before that; and I remember him—the doctor, I mean. Why, I must have been a good-sized boy when they left!”

“Yes,” said Virginia sadly.

“I thought it was longer ago than that,” he muttered.

There was no use in his trying to show a grief he did not feel; his aunt would have detected the false ring if he had attempted it; yet he wondered, disquietingly, that he was so little stirred.

He never asked to see Dr. Stillman's letter, and only read it when he found that Virginia was really anxious he should; and then having read it, he returned it to her without comment beyond the words, “I don't like him!” meaning the doctor; but then, as a child, he had not liked him.