d by his trouble, she put her arm about the child's neck and
drew him to her.

"Because, my boy, the lot of Jameray Duval, the poor and friendless lad
who succeeded at last, will be your lot, yours and your brother's, and
I have brought it upon you. Before very long, dear child, you will be
alone in the world, with no one to help or befriend you. While you are
still children, I shall leave you, and yet, if only I could wait till
you are big enough and know enough to be Marie's guardian! But I shall
not live so long. I love you so much that it makes me very unhappy to
think of it. Dear children, if only you do not curse me some day!----"

"But why should I curse you some day, mother?"

"Some day," she said, kissing him on the forehead, "you will find out
that I have wronged you. I am going to leave you, here, without money,
without"--and she hesitated--"without a father," she added, and at the
word she burst into tears and put the boy from her gently. A sort of
intuition told Louis that his mother wished to be alone, and he carried
off Marie, now half awake. An hour later, when his brother was in bed,
he stole down and out to the summer-house where his mother was sitting.

"Louis! come here."

The words were spoken in tones delicious to his heart. The boy sprang to
his mother's arms, and the two held each other in an almost convulsive
embrace.

"_Cherie_," he said at last, the name by which he often called her,
finding that even loving words were too weak to express his feeling,
"_cherie_, why are you afraid that you are going to die?"

"I am ill, my poor darling; every day I am losing strength, and there is
no cure for my illness; I know that."

"What is the matter with you?"

"Something that I ought to forget; something that you must never
know.--You must not know what caused my death."

The boy was silent for a while. He stole a glance now and again at
his mother; and she, with her eyes raised to the sky, was watching the
clouds. It was a sad, sweet moment. Louis could not believe that his
mother would die soon, but instinctively he felt trouble which he could
not guess. He respected her long musings. If he had been rather older,
he would have read happy memories blended with thoughts of repentance,
the whole story of a woman's life in that sublime face--the careless
childhood, the loveless marriage, a terrible passion, flowers springing
up in storm and struck down by the thunderbolt into an abyss from whic