“To support her little one she had worked incessantly with her needle.  Love for her child had given her strength to endure her life of hardship; but it had not enabled her to bear my desertion, the keenest of all her griefs.  Many times she had thought of trying to see me, but her woman’s pride had always prevented this.  While I squandered floods of gold upon my caprices, no memory of the past had ever bidden a single drop to fall in her home to help mother and child to live; but she had been content to weep, and had not cursed me; she had looked upon her evil fortune as the natural punishment of her error.  With the aid of a good priest of Saint Sulpice, whose kindly voice had restored peace to her soul, she had sought for hope in the shadow of the altar, whither she had gone to dry her tears.  The bitter flood that I had poured into her heart gradually abated; and one day, when she heard her child say ‘Father,’ a word that she had not taught him, she forgave my crime.  But sorrow and weeping and days and nights of ceaseless toil injured her health.  Religion had brought its consolations and the courage to bear the ills of life, but all too late.  She fell ill of a heart complaint brought on by grief and by the strain of expectation, for she always thought that I should return, and her hopes always sprang up afresh after every disappointment.  Her health grew worse; and at last, as she was lying on her deathbed, she wrote those few lines, containing no word of reproach, prompted by religion, and by a belief in the goodness in my nature.  She knew, she said, that I was blinded rather than bent on doing wrong.  She even accused herself of carrying her womanly pride too far.  ’If I had only written sooner,’ she said, ’perhaps there might have been time for a marriage which would have legitimated our child.’

“It was only on her child’s account that she wished for the solemnization of the ties that bound us, nor would she have sought for this if she had not felt that death was at hand to unloose them.  But it was too late; even then she had only a few hours to live.  By her bedside, where I learned to know the worth of a devoted heart, my nature underwent a final change.  I was still at an age when tears are shed.  During those last days, while the precious life yet lingered, my tears, my words, and everything I did bore witness to my heartstricken repentance.  The meanness and pettiness of the society in which I had moved, the emptiness and selfishness of women of fashion, had taught me to wish for and to seek an elect soul, and now I had found it—­too late.  I was weary of lying words and of masked faces; counterfeit passion had set me dreaming; I had called on love; and now I beheld love lying before me, slain by my own hands, and had no power to keep it beside me, no power to keep what was so wholly mine.