rt presses the balance,
And a sacred thing was her loving,
For love is the latch-key to Heaven.

But she tries to force back her sorrow
At the sacred shrine of her birthplace;
And the angels are gentle that hover
At the rustic shade of the hearthstone.
All the sorrow comes out of the shadow,
All the bitterness bathes in the sunshine,
The stubbornest pangs of resentment
Are cooled to the calm of forgiveness;
And charity cradles the armor
That was harnessed in bristling anger.

Her mother is summoned with others
At the call of Cortez to assemble,
And Malinche sees mother and brother
Through the soul of an earnest hunger.
She (young in all things but her sorrow,
And with only her nature to prompt her)
Beholds, with the heart of a daughter,
The mother that cruelly spurned her,
In the fading Spring of her lifetime.
The mother, as ready responding
To the tie that her crime would have broken,
Sees her child, like the face of a spectre,
Rising out of the grave to accuse her,
And in terror would fly from her presence;
But Malinche sprang forward to grasp her,
And, forgetting all else but her mother,
Poured out her full heart in caresses,

Saying, "Surely, my mother, you knew not
When you sold me away to the traders;
Surely, not with your voice could you sanction,
Your words would have frozen together,
And not with your heart you consented.
The blood would have whited to marble;
Some artifice surely was practiced.
My mother was _always_ my mother;
And though you unwittingly sold me,
Malinche is free to forgive you.
Take back to your bosom your daughter,
It is all for the best that we parted,
For it gave me my sweet Mary Mother
With her child, the immaculate God-Son;
And better a slave and a Christian,
Than a priest in the pay of the temple.
And, yet, how I longed for a mother,
To show the clear trail for my footsteps,

And to hold the white hand of my childhood!
With no other mother but Mary
(Sweet Mary, the soul of compas