“Perhaps I had better go up to her at once.  We are deeply grateful to you, Mr. Mullen, for your sympathy.”

“Who would not have felt?” rejoined the other, and taking up his hat from the table, he went out, still treading softly as though he were walking upon something he feared to hurt.

“Poor mother!  It’s wonderful the way she has with people!” exclaimed Gay, turning to Kesiah.

“She’s always had it with men—­there’s something so appealing about her.  You’ll be very careful what you say to her, Jonathan.”

“Oh, I’ll not confess my sins, if that’s what you mean,” he responded as he ascended the staircase.

The room was fragrant with burning cedar, and from the dormer-windows, latticed by boughs, a band of sunlight stretched over the carpet to the high white bed in which his mother was lying.  Her plaintive blue eyes, which clung to him when he entered, appeared to say; “Yes, see how they have hurt me—­a poor frail creature.”  Above her forehead her hair, which was going grey, broke into a mist, and spread in soft, pale strands over the pillow.  Never had her helpless sweetness appealed so strongly to his emotions, as when she laid her hand on his arm and said in an apologetic whisper: 

“Dear boy, how I hated to bring you back.”

“As if I wouldn’t have come from the end of the world, dearest mother,” he answered.

He had fallen on his knees by her bed, but when Kesiah brought him a chair, he rose and settled himself more comfortably.

“I wanted you, dear, but if you knew how I dreaded to become a drag on you.  Men must be free, I know—­never let me interfere with your freedom—­I feel such a helpless, burdensome creature.”

“If you could only see how young and lovely you look even when you are ill, you would never fear becoming a burden.  In spite of your grey hairs, you might pass for a girl at this minute.”

“You wicked flatterer!—­but, oh, Jonathan, I’ve had a blow!”

“I understand.  It must have been rough.”

“And to think how I always idealized him!—­how I had believed in his love for me and cherished his memory!  To discover that even at the last—­on his deathbed—­he was thinking of that woman!”

She wept gently, wiping her eyes with a resigned and suffering gesture on the handkerchief Kesiah had handed her.  “I feel as if my whole universe had crumbled,” she said.

“But it was no affront to you, mother—­it all happened before he saw you, and was only an episode.  Those things don’t bite into a man’s life, you know.”

“Of course, I knew there had been something, but I thought he had forgotten it—­that he was faithful to his love for me—­his spirit worship, he called it.  Then to find out so long after his death—­when his memory had become a part of my religion—­that he had turned back at the end.”

“It wasn’t turning away from you, it was merely an atonement.  Your influence was visible even there.”