“Dost thou know yet, when thou readest this, little Paul, with thy father’s eyes—­dost thou know, I wonder, the meaning of that great love which to the twain who realize it becomes a sacrament—­dost understand?—­a sacrament holier even than a prayer.  It was even so with thy father and me—­dost thou—­canst thou understand?  If not yet, sometime thou wilt, and thou wilt then forgive thy mother for her sin.”

She told of the taunts and persecutions to which she was forced to submit upon her return to her kingdom.  The king and his friends had vilely commended her for her “patriotism” in finding an heir to the throne.  “Napoleon would have felt honored,” her husband had sneered, “if Josephine had adopted thy method of finding him the heir he desired!” But through it all, she said, she had not faltered.  She had held the one thought supreme in her heart and remembered that however guilty she might be in the eyes of the world, there was a higher truth in the words of Mrs. Browning, “God trusts me with a child,” and had dared to pray.

“To pray for strength and grace and wisdom to give thee birth, my baby, and to make thee all that thou shouldst be—­to develop thee into the man I and thy father would have thee become.  I was not only giving an heir to the throne of my realm.  I was giving a son to the husband of my soul.  But the world did not know that.  Whatever it might suspect, it could actually know—­nothing!  The secret was thy father’s and mine—­his and mine alone—­and now it is thine, as it needs must be!  Guard it well, my baby, and let it make thy life and thy manhood full of strength and power and sweetness and glory and joy, and remember, as thou readest for the first time this story of thy coming into the world, that thy mother counted it her greatest, proudest glory to be the chosen love of thy father, and the mother of his son.”

She had touched as lightly as she could upon the dark hours of her baby’s coming, when she was doomed to pass through that Valley of the Shadow far away from the protecting and comforting love of him whose right it was by every law of Nature to have been, then of all times, by her side; but the Boy felt the pathos of it, and his eyes filled with tears.  His mother—­the mother of his dreams—­his glorious queen-mother—­to suffer all this for him—­for him!

And Father Paul!—­his own father!  What must this cross have been to him!  Surely he would love him all the rest of his life to make up for all that suffering!

Then he thought of the other letters and he read them all, his heart torn between grief and anger—­for they told him all the appalling details of the tragedy that had taken his mother from him, and left his father and himself bereaved of all that made life dear and worth the living to man and boy.