and occupation in the great world. It is everything
for us if we can coax him into coming under our own roof-tree. This is
difficult to do. It is natural for a young man launched into the world
to like his own chez lui. Then what will happen to Gustave? He,
lonely and heart-stricken, will ask friends, young as himself, but
far stronger, to come and cheer him; or he will seek to distract his
thoughts by the overwork of his brain; in either case he is doomed. But
I have stronger motives yet to fix him a while at our hearth. This
is just the moment, once lost never to be regained, when soothing
companionship, gentle reproachless advice, can fix him lastingly in the
habits and modes of life which will banish all fears of his future from
the hearts of his parents. You at least honour him with friendship, with
kindly interest--you at least would desire to wean him from all that a
friend may disapprove or lament--a creature whom Providence meant to be
good, and perhaps great. If I say to him, 'It will be long before you
can go out and see your friends, but at my house your friends shall come
and see you--among them Signora Venosta and Mademoiselle Cicogna will
now and then drop in'--my victory is gained, and my son is saved."

"Madame," said Isaura, half sobbing, "what a blessing to have a mother
like you! Love so noble ennobles those who hear its voice. Tell your son
how ardently I wish him to be well, and to fulfil more than the promise
of his genius; tell him also this--how I envy him his mother."

CHAPTER XV.

It needs no length of words to inform thee, my intelligent reader,
be thou man or woman--but more especially woman--of the consequences
following each other, as wave follows wave in a tide, that resulted from
the interview with which my last chapter closed. Gustave is removed to
his parents' house; he remains for weeks confined within doors, or, on
sunny days, takes an hour or so in his own carriage, drawn by the horse
bought from Rochebriant, into by-roads remote from the fashionable
world; Isaura visits his mother, liking, respecting, influenced by her
more and more; in those visits she sits beside the sofa on which Rameau
reclines. Gradually, gently--more and more by his mother's lips--is
impressed on her the belief that it is in her power to save a human
life, and to animate its career towards those goals which are never
based wholly upon earth in the earnest eyes of genius, or perhaps in the
yet more up