I am but a poor comforter even at the best of moments, but in this instance, not knowing upon what chord to touch, my speaking could be of very little avail; nevertheless, I hazarded a few consolatory words, such as we always have at hand to exhort sufferers to bear their ills with patience and look beyond the cloud surrounding them to hopes of better things; but I am afraid all I said was very meaningless, for the affliction of which I had been the witness, without knowing its cause, having in a manner impregnated my own heart, I was too much in need of comfort myself to be able to impart any to others.  The two men thanked me, however, artlessly, naively, and seemed about to initiate me into the secret of their distress, when the cottage door by which we were standing opened, and a woman with an anxious, inquiring expression on her face came out to meet us.  She was old, being perhaps fifty-five years of age, but Time had dealt less harshly with her features than Grief, and the wrinkles which furrowed her cheeks and contracted her forehead into thin, shriveled folds showed less the footprints of departed seasons than the marks of that hard iron hand of Sorrow whose least touches sear more surely than fire.  Her hair was white as spun-glass, and neatly confined under one of those high Norman caps of which the long starched frills, encircling the face, lend a cold, severe expression to the wearer:  her gait was stooping, her steps feeble, and her whole appearance denoted lassitude and weakness.  She was, as I guessed, the wife of the elder and the mother of the younger of my companions; and the glance she threw at these when she saw them told as plainly as the language of a wife’s and mother’s eyes can tell what a large and willing share she claimed of all their trials.  As she appeared her husband hastily turned his face from her to dry his tears and to assume with a loving, simple hypocrisy a cheerful countenance, with which he fondly hoped to hide the trouble of his heart.  “Madeleine,” he said in a voice which, poor man! he meant to be gay—­“Madeleine, I bring you a stranger very cold, very wet, and, I’ve no doubt, very hungry.  You must try to—­” but here he stopped short:  his wife’s eyes were fixed upon him with a look of quiet reproach.

“Francois,” she asked in a low, slightly tremulous tone, “you have some news to give me?” and at the same time she glanced from him to her son.  A moment’s silence followed.  Henri and his father exchanged a timid look, but before either had spoken the wife had thrown herself into her husband’s arms:  what need had she of an answer—­she, who for years had been used to read every thought, every wish, every feeling of those she loved, long ere they gave expression to them?

I shall never forget that scene—­father, mother and son clasped in each other’s embrace, and giving free course to their grief in tears of which each tried to stop the flow from the other’s eyes, forgetful of the bitter stream which ran from his own; each striving to find in his heart a word of comfort for the other, and each seeking in vain a like word for himself.