ed, "let me weep on. It is such a relief; for ten years I
have suffered in secret. Oh, how I suffered! That secret, so long shut up
in my breast, was killing me. I should soon have died, like my dear
mother. God has had pity upon me, and has sent you, and made you share it
with me. Let me tell you all, sir, do let me!"

She could speak no more. Sobs and tears broke her voice. So it always
is with proud and lofty natures. After having conquered grief, and
imprisoned it, buried, and, as it were, crushed down in the secret depths
of the mind, they seem happy, or, at any rate, indifferent to the eyes of
the uninformed around, and the eye of the most watchful observer might be
mistaken; but let a sudden shock break the seal, an unexpected rending of
a portion of the veil, then, as with the crash of a thunderstorm, the
tower in which the sufferer hid his sorrow falls in ruins to the ground.
The conquered foe rises more fierce than before his defeat and captivity;
he shakes with fury the prison doors, the frame trembles with long
shudderings, sobs and sighs heave the breast, the tears, too long
contained within bounds, overflow their swollen banks, bounding and
rushing as if after the heavy rain of a thunderstorm.

Such was Odile.

At length she lifted her beautiful head; she wiped her tear-stained
cheeks, and with her arm on the elbow of her chair, her cheek resting
on her hand, and her eyes tenderly fixed on a picture on the wall, she
resumed in slow and melancholy tones:--

"When I go back into the past, sir, when I return to my first
impressions, my mother's is the picture before me. She was a tall, pale,
and silent woman. She was still young at the period to which I am
referring. She was scarcely thirty, and yet you would have thought her
fifty. Her brow was silvered round with hair white as snow; her thin,
hollow cheeks, her sharp, clear profile--her lips ever closed together
with an expression of pain--gave to her features a strange character in
which pride and pain seemed to contend for the mastery. There was nothing
left of the elasticity of youth in that aged woman of thirty--nothing
but her tall, upright figure, her brilliant eyes, and her voice, which
was always as gentle and as sweet as a dream of childhood. She often
walked up and down for hours in this very room, with her head hanging
down, and I, an unthinking child, ran happily along by her side, never
aware that my mother was sad, never understanding the m