d my knees shook, and I thought, If she is dead?

I left my comrades drinking and resting at a wine-shop just outside the
town, and went all alone to look for her. I found the house--the gloomy
barred window hanging over the water, the dark stone walls frowning down
on the gloomy street. There was a woman, quite old, with white hair, who
was getting up water at the street-fountain that I had gone to a
thousand times in my childhood. I looked at her. I did not know her: I
only saw a woman feeble and old. But she, with the brass _secchia_
filled, turned round and saw me, and dropped the brazen pitcher on the
ground, and fell at my feet with a bitter cry. Then I knew her.

When in the light of the hot, strong sun I saw how in those ten years my
mother had grown old--old, bent, broken, white-haired, in those ten
years that had been all glow and glitter, and pleasure and pastime, and
movement and mirth to me--then I knew that I had sinned against her with
a mighty sin--a sin of cruelty, of neglect, of selfish wickedness. She
had been young still when I had left her--young and fair to look at, and
without a silver line in her ebon hair, and with suitors about her for
her beauty like bees about the blossoms of the ivy in the autumn-time.
And now--now she was quite old.

She never rebuked me: she only said, "My son! my son! God be praised!"
and said that a thousand times, weeping and trembling. Some women are
like this.

When the bright, burning midsummer day had grown into a gray,
firefly-lighted night, I laid me down on the narrow bed where I had
slept as a child, and my mother kissed me as though I were a child. It
seemed to purify me from all the sins of all the absent years, except,
indeed, of that one unpardonable sin against her. In the morning she
opened the drawers of an old bureau and showed me everything I had sent
her all those years: all was untouched, the money as well as the
presents. "I took nothing while you did not give me yourself," she said.
I felt my throat choke.

It was early day: she asked me to go to mass with her. I did so to
please her. All the while I watched her bent, feeble, aged figure and
the white hair under the yellow kerchief, and felt as if I had killed
her. This lone old creature was not the mother like Raffaelle's Madonna
I had left: I could never make her again what she had been.

"It is my son," she said to her neighbors, but she said it with pain
rather than with pride, for she hat