lled, gave one great sob. 'Oh, Louis!'
he murmured, and was silent.

"And then, mamma, there began a struggle for rescue such as I dare not
even recall. I saw it because I could not look elsewhere, but I crushed
its meaning from my consciousness, lest I should myself perish before I
saw him safe. And all the while the figure hanging over us swayed with
the rocking of the beam, and gave no help until that last terrible
moment when his cousin, reaching down, was able to sustain him under the
arm till he could get his other hand up and clasp it around the beam.
Then it all looked well, and we began to hope, when suddenly and without
warning the nearly rescued man gave a great shriek, and crying, 'You
have conquered!' unloosed his grasp, and fell headlong into the abyss.

"Mamma, I did not faint. An unnatural strength seemed given to me. But I
looked at the marquis, and for the first time he looked at me, and I saw
the expression of horrified amaze with which he had beheld his cousin
disappear gradually change to one of the softest and divinest looks that
ever visited a noble visage, and knew that even out of that pit of death
love had arisen for us two, and that henceforth we belonged to each
other, whether our span of life should be cut short in a moment or
extended into an eternity of years. His own heart seemed to assure him
of the same sweet fact, for the next moment he was renewing his
superhuman efforts, but this time for our rescue and his own. He worked
himself along that beam; he gave another leap; he landed at our side,
and tore a way for us through that closed door. In another five minutes
we were in the street, with half Paris surging about us, but before the
crowd had quite seized upon me, he had found time to whisper in my ear:

"'I am the Marquis de la Roche-Guyon. It will always be a matter of
thankfulness to me that I was not left to sacrifice the fairest woman in
the world to the rescue of a thankless coward.'

"Mamma, do you blame me for giving such a man my heart, and do you
wonder that what I have dedicated to this hero I can never yield to any
other man?"

The mother was silent--for a long time silent. Was she horror-stricken
at the story of a danger she had never fully comprehended till now? Or
were her thoughts busy with her own past, and its possible
incommunicable secrets of blood and horror? The cry she gave at last
betrayed anguish, but did not answer this question.

"My child! my child! m