e did you meet her, Uncle?"

"At Lucerne!"

"Lucerne!" echoed the Boy, his blue eyes growing dreamy with musing.
"That says nothing to me--nothing! and yet--you will laugh at me, I
know, but I sometimes get the most tantalizing impression that I
remember my mother. It is absurd, of course--I suppose I could not
possibly remember her--and yet there is such a haunting, vague sense of
close-clinging arms, of an intensely white and tender face bending over
me--sometimes in the radiance of day and again in the soft shadows of
night, but always, always alight with love--of kisses, soft and warm,
and yet often tearful--and of black, lustrous hair, over which there
always seems to shine a halo--a very coronet of triumphant motherhood."

Verdayne's lips moved, but no sound came from them to voice the
passionate cry in his heart, "My Queen, my Queen!"

"I suppose it is only a curious dream! It must be, of course! But it is
a very real vision to me, and I would not part with it for the world.
Uncle, do you know, I can never look upon the pictured face of a Madonna
without being forcibly reminded of this vision of my mother--the mother
I can see only in dreams!"

Verdayne found it growing harder and harder for him to speak.

"I do not think that strange, Boy. Others would not understand it, but I
do. She was so intensely a mother that the spirit of the great Holy
Mother must have been at all times hovering closely about her! Her
deepest desires centred about her son. You were the embodiment of the
greatest, sweetest joys--if not the only real joys--of her strangely
unhappy life, and her whole thought, her one hope, was for you. In your
soul must live all the unrealized hopes and crucified ideals of the
woman who, always every inch a queen, was never more truly regal than in
the supreme hour that crowned her your mother."

"And am I like her, Uncle Paul? Am I really like her?"

"So much so, Boy, that she sometimes seems to live again in you. Like
her, you believe so thoroughly in the goodness and greatness of a
God--in the beauty and glory of the world fraught with lessons of life
and death--in the omnipotence of Fate--in the truth and power and
grandeur of overmastering love. You believe in the past, in all the
dreams and legends of the Long Ago still relived in the Now, in the
capabilities of the human mind, the kingship of the soul. Your voice is
hers, every tone and cadence is as her own voice repeating her own
words. B