e is older than you are. There is one thing--yes--there is one
thing, if you could say it truly! It would help me a little if you
could say it--and yet--no--I'm not sure--if you did, it would only show
that you have more heart than he has.'

'Who?' Margaret vaguely guessed the truth.

'Who? Tom--my son! "Edmund Lushington," who feels that he cannot ask a
respectable girl to marry him because his mother has been a wicked
woman.'

The big woman shook from head to foot as she spoke.

Margaret was pained and her fingers tightened nervously on the other's
wrist.

'Oh, please don't!' she cried. 'Please don't!'

'He's right,' answered Madame Bonanni, hanging her large head and
shaking it despairingly. 'Of course, he's right, and it's true! But,
oh!--she looked up again, suddenly--'oh, how much more right it must be
for a man to forgive his mother, no matter what she has done!'

Margaret's fingers glided from the wrist they held, to the large hand,
and pressed it sympathetically, but she could not find anything to say
which would do. The friendly pressure, however, evidently meant enough
to the distressed woman.

'Thank you, dear,' she said gratefully. 'You re very good to me. I know
you mean it, too. Only, you re not placed as he is. If you were my
daughter, you would think as he thinks--you would not live under my
roof! Perhaps you would not even see me when we met in the street! You
would look the other way!'

Margaret could not have told, for her life, what she would have done,
but she was far too kind-hearted not to protest.

'Indeed I wouldn't!' she cried, with so much energy that Madame Bonanni
believed her.

'No matter what I had done?' asked she pathetically eager for the
assurance.

'You'd have been my mother just the same,' answered Margaret softly.

As the girl spoke, she felt a little sharp revolt in her heart against
what she had said, at the mere thought of associating the word 'mother'
with Madame Bonanni.

There was nothing at all psychological in that, and it would hardly
bear analysing even by a professional dissector of character. It was
just the natural feeling, in a natural girl, whose mother had been
honest and good. But Madame Bonanni only heard the kind words.

'Yes,' she answered, 'I should have been your mother, just the same.
But I couldn't have been a better mother to you than I've been to Tom.
I couldn't, indeed!'

'No,' Margaret said, in the same gentle tone as before, 'you've