g about him, startled to find
himself here, roused from his nightmare.

"I am mad," thought he, "I suspect my mother." And a surge of love and
emotion, of repentance, and prayer, and grief, welled up in his heart.
His mother! Knowing her as he knew her, how could he ever have suspected
her? Was not the soul, was not the life of this simple-minded, chaste,
and loyal woman clearer than water? Could any one who had seen and
known her ever think of her but as above suspicion? And he, her son,
had doubted her! Oh, if he could but have taken her in his arms at that
moment, how he would have kissed and caressed her, and gone on his knees
to crave pardon.

Would she have deceived his father--she?

His father!--A very worthy man, no doubt, upright and honest in
business, but with a mind which had never gone beyond the horizon of his
shop. How was it that this woman, who must have been very pretty--as he
knew, and it could still be seen--gifted, too, with a delicate, tender
emotional soul, could have accepted a man so unlike herself as a suitor
and a husband? Why inquire? She had married, as young French girls
do marry, the youth with a little fortune proposed to her by their
relations. They had settled at once in their shop in the Rue Montmartre;
and the young wife, ruling over the desk, inspired by the feeling of a
new home, and the subtle and sacred sense of interests in common which
fills the place of love, and even of regard, by the domestic hearth of
most of the commercial houses of Paris, had set to work, with all her
superior and active intelligence, to make the fortune they hoped for.
And so her life had flowed on, uniform, peaceful and respectable, but
loveless.

Loveless?--was it possible then that a woman should not love? That
a young and pretty woman, living in Paris, reading books, applauding
actresses for dying of passion on the stage, could live from youth to
old age without once feeling her heart touched? He would not believe it
of any one else; why should she be different from all others, though she
was his mother?

She had been young, with all the poetic weaknesses which agitate the
heart of a young creature. Shut up, imprisoned in the shop, by the
side of a vulgar husband who always talked of trade, she had dreamed
of moonlight nights, of voyages, of kisses exchanged in the shades of
evening. And then, one day a man had come in, as lovers do in books, and
had talked as they talk.

She had loved him. Wh