“The experience of four years had taught me to know my own real character.  My temperament, the nature of my imagination, my religious principles, which had not been eradicated, but had rather lain dormant; my turn of mind, my heart that only now began to make itself felt—­everything within me led me to resolve to fill my life with the pleasures of affection, to replace a lawless love by family happiness —­the truest happiness on earth.  Visions of close and dear companionship appealed to me but the more strongly for my wanderings in the wilderness, my grasping at pleasures unennobled by thought or feeling.  So though the revolution within me was rapidly effected, it was permanent.  With my southern temperament, warped by the life I led in Paris, I should certainly have come to look without pity on an unhappy girl betrayed by her lover; I should have laughed at the story if it had been told me by some wag in merry company (for with us in France a clever bon mot dispels all feelings of horror at a crime), but all sophistries were silenced in the presence of this angelic creature, against whom I could bring no least word of reproach.  There stood her coffin, and my child, who did not know that I had murdered his mother, and smiled at me.

“She died.  She died happy when she saw that I loved her, and that this new love was due neither to pity nor to the ties that bound us together.  Never shall I forget her last hours.  Love had been won back, her mind was at rest about her child, and happiness triumphed over suffering.  The comfort and luxury about her, the merriment of her child, who looked prettier still in the dainty garb that had replaced his baby-clothes, were pledges of a happy future for the little one, in whom she saw her own life renewed.

“The curate of Saint Sulpice witnessed my terrible distress.  His words well-nigh made me despair.  He did not attempt to offer conventional consolation, and put the gravity of my responsibilities unsparingly before me, but I had no need of a spur.  The conscience within me spoke loudly enough already.  A woman had placed a generous confidence in me.  I had lied to her from the first; I had told her that I loved her, and then I had cast her off; I had brought all this sorrow upon an unhappy girl who had braved the opinion of the world for me, and who therefore should have been sacred in my eyes.  She had died forgiving me.  Her implicit trust in the word of a man who had once before broken his promise to her effaced the memory of all her pain and grief, and she slept in peace.  Agatha, who had given me her girlish faith, had found in her heart another faith to give me—­the faith of a mother.  Oh! sir, the child, her child!  God alone can know all that he was to me!  The dear little one was like his mother; he had her winning grace in his little ways, his talk and ideas; but for me, my child was not only a child, but something more; was he not the token of my forgiveness, my honor?