Chapter 11

"The evening of life brings with it its lamp."--TOUBERT.

"And there arrives a lull in the hot race:
And an unwonted calm pervades the breast.
And then he thinks he knows
The hills where his life rose,
And the sea, where it goes."--ARNOLD

"She has passed
To where, beyond these voices, there is peace."

It is the greatest folly to think that the only time worth writing
about is youth. It is an equal folly to imagine that love is the only
passion universally interesting. Elizabeth's years were no less vivid,
no less full of feeling and of changes, after her marriage than before
it. Indeed, she never quite lost the interests of her maiden life.
Hallam demanded an oversight she did not fail to give it. Three times
during the twelve years of its confiscation to Antony's creditors she
visited it. In these visits she was accompanied by Richard, and Harry,
and her own children. Then the Whaleys' accounts were carefully gone
over, and found always to be perfectly honorable and satisfactory.
And it is needless to say how happy Martha was at such times.

Gradually all ill-feeling passed away. The young squire, though
educated abroad, had just such a training as made him popular. For
he passed part of every year in Texas with Dick Millard, and all that
could be known about horses and hunting and woodcraft, Harry Hallam
knew. He had also taken on very easily the Texan manner, frank, yet
rather proud and phlegmatic: "Evidently a young man who knows what
he wants, and will be apt to get it," said Whaley.

"Nine Yorkshire jockeys knocked into one couldn't blind him on a
horse," said young Horton.

"And I'll lay a guinea he'll lead in every hunting field."

"And they do say, he's a first-rate scholar besides."

Such conversations regarding him were indefinitely repeated, and
varied.

When he was in his eighteenth year the estate was absolutely free of
every claim, and in a condition which reflected the greatest credit
upon those in whose care it had been placed. It was at this time that
Richard and Elizabeth took the young man into his grandfather's room,
and laid before him the title deeds of his patrimony and the schedule
of its various incomes. Then, also, they told him, with infinite
kindness and forbearance, the story of his father's efforts and
failures, and the manner in which the estate had been handled, so that
it might be made over to him free of all debt and stain.

Harry said very little. His adopted parents liked him the better for
that. But he was profoundly amazed and grateful. Then he went to
Cambridge, and for three years Elizabeth did not see him. It had
been arranged,