ng her put energy into the children's
work; and they knew that their mother lived for them, and that all her
thoughts and her time were given to them. A wonderful instinct, neither
selfishness nor reason, perhaps the first innocent beginnings of
sentiment teaches children to know whether or not they are the first and
sole thought, to find out those who love to think of them and for them.
If you really love children, the dear little ones, with open hearts and
unerring sense of justice, are marvelously ready to respond to love.
Their love knows passion and jealousy and the most gracious delicacy
of feeling; they find the tenderest words of expression; they trust
you--put an entire belief in you. Perhaps there are no undutiful
children without undutiful mothers, for a child's affection is always
in proportion to the affection that it receives--in early care, in the
first words that it hears, in the response of the eyes to which a child
first looks for love and life. All these things draw them closer to the
mother or drive them apart. God lays the child under the mother's heart,
that she may learn that for a long time to come her heart must be
its home. And yet--there are mothers cruelly slighted, mothers whose
sublime, pathetic tenderness meets only a harsh return, a hideous
ingratitude which shows how difficult it is to lay down hard-and-fast
rules in matters of feeling.

Here, not one of all the thousand heart ties that bind child and mother
had been broken. The three were alone in the world; they lived one life,
a life of close sympathy. If Mme. Willemsens was silent in the morning,
Louis and Marie would not speak, respecting everything in her, even
those thoughts which they did not share. But the older boy, with a
precocious power of thought, would not rest satisfied with his mother's
assertion that she was perfectly well. He scanned her face with uneasy
forebodings; the exact danger he did not know, but dimly he felt it
threatening in those purple rings about her eyes, in the deepening
hollows under them, and the feverish red that deepened in her face. If
Marie's play began to tire her, his sensitive tact was quick to discover
this, and he would call to his brother:

"Come, Marie! let us run in to breakfast, I am hungry!"

But when they reached the door, he would look back to catch the
expression on his mother's face. She still could find a smile for him,
nay, often there were tears in her eyes when some little thin