It was
his privilege. In the adoption of sorrow, and not of joy, he had taken
this mother of his love to be his mother.

"Don't give her up," he said. "I will find her if she is alive."

CHAPTER VII.

A search, continued unintermittingly for a week among the hotels and
lodging-houses of Boston, proved finally successful. He found her. As she
opened the door of the miserable apartment which she occupied, and saw
who it was that had knocked, the hard, unbeautiful red of shame covered
her face. She would have closed the door against him, had he not quickly
stepped within. Her eyelids fluttered a moment, and then she met his gaze
with a look of reckless hardihood. Still holding the door half open, she
said--

"Henry Burr, what do you want?"

The masses of her dark hairs hung low about her neck in disorder, and
even in that first glance his eye had noted a certain negligent
untidiness about her toilet most different from her former ways. Her face
was worn and strangely aged and saddened, but beautiful still with the
quenchless beauty of the glorious eyes, though sleepless nights had left
their dark traces round them;

"What do you want? Why do you come here?" she demanded again, in harsh,
hard tones; for he had been too much moved in looking at her to reply at
once.

Now, however, he took the door-handle out of her hand and closed the
door, and said, with only the boundless tenderness of his moist eyes to
mend the bluntness of the words--

"Madeline, I want you. I want you for my wife."

The faintest possible trace of scorn was perceptible about her lips, but
her former expression of hard indifference was otherwise quite unchanged
as she replied, in a spiritless voice--

"So you came here to mock me? It was taking a good deal of trouble, but
it is fair you should have your revenge."

He came close up to her.

"I'm not mocking. I'm in earnest. I'm one of those fellows who can never
love but one woman, and love her for ever and ever. If there were not a
scrap of you left bigger than your thumb, I'd rather have it than any
woman in the world."

And now her face changed. There came into it the wistful look of those
before whom passes a vision of happiness not for them, a look such as
might be in the face of a doomed spirit which, floating by, should catch
a glimpse of heavenly meads, and be glad to have had it, although its own
way lay toward perdition. With a sudden impulse she dropped upon her
knee,