She cut the article from the paper and inclosed it to him with the accompanying note: "We go to New York this afternoon, and sail for Europe to-morrow. You send us in parting a characteristic souvenir, which I return to you. The scenes and associations indicated in this disgraceful paragraph seem more to your taste than those which your family have hitherto enjoyed as their right for many generations. While this remains true, you, of necessity, cut yourself off from your kindred, and we, who are most closely connected, must remain where our names cannot be associated with yours. I still cherish the hope, however, that you may find the way of the transgressor so hard that you will be brought by your bitter experience to accept of my offer and give the world a chance to forget your folly and wickedness. When you will do this in good faith (and my lawyer will see that it is done in good faith), you may draw on him for the means of a comfortable support. In bitter shame and sorrow, your mother, "EMILY HALDANE."
This letter was a severe blow to her son, for it contained the last words of the mother that he might not see for years. While he felt it to be cruelly unjust to him and his present aims, he was calm enough now to see that the distorted paragraph which led to it fitted in only too well with the past, and so had the coloring of truth. When inclined to blame his mother for not waiting for his versions of these miserable events and accepting of them alone, he was compelled to remember that she was in part awakened from her blind idolatry of him by the discovery of his efforts to deceive her in regard to his increasing dissipation. Even before he had entered Mr. Arnot's counting-room he had taught her to doubt his word, and now she had evidently lost confidence in him utterly. He foresaw that this confidence could be regained only by years of patient well-doing, and that she might incline to believe in him more slowly even than comparative strangers. But he was not disposed to be very angry and resentful, for he now had but little confidence in himself. He had been led, however, by his bitter experience and by Mrs. Arnot's faithful ministry to adopt that lady's brief but comprehensive creed, He was learning to trust in Christ as an all-powerful and personal friend; he was daily seeking to grasp the principles which Christ taught, but more clearly acted out, and which are essential to the formation of a noble character. He had thus complied with the best conditions of spiritual growth; and the crude elements of his character, which had been rendered more chaotic by evil, slowly began to shape themselves into the symmetry of a true man.