Gradually the familiar things around her came back. She remembered herself, no despairing girl, no soul in bondage, but a sober woman, disenchanted in many ways, but never yet cured of those hopes and that faith which hold the ardent spirit to life. Her countenance changed with her thoughts, her eyes ceased to be abstracted and visionary, her colour came back. She turned to the old gentleman with a look which for the first time disturbed and bewildered that old and hardened spectator of the vicissitudes of life. Her eyes filled with a curious liquid light, an expression wistful, flattering, entreating. She looked at him as a child looks who has a favour to ask, her head a little on one side, her lips quivering with a smile. There came into the old lawyer’s mind, he could not tell how, a ridiculous sense of being a superior being, a kind of god, able to confer untold advantages and favours. What did the woman want of him? What--it did not matter what she wanted--could he do for her? Nothing that he was aware of: and a sense of the danger of being cajoled came into his mind, but along with that, which was ridiculous, though he could not help it, a sense of being really a superior being, able to grant favours, and benignant, as he had never quite known himself to be. “Mr. Templar,” she said, “now all is over there is not another word to say: and now the boy--my boy----” “The boy?” he repeated, with a surprised air. “My child that was taken from me as soon as he was born, my little helpless bairn that never knew his mother--my son, my son! Give me a right to him, give me my lawful title to him, and there can be no more doubt about it--that nobody may say he is not mine.” The old lawyer was more confused than words could say. The very sense she had managed to convey to his mind of being a superior being, full of graces and gifts to confer, made his downfall the more ludicrous to himself. He seemed to tumble down from an altitude quite visionary, yet very real, as if by some neglect or ill-will of his own. He felt himself humiliated, a culprit before her. “My dear lady,” he said, “you are going too fast and too far for me. I did not even know there was any---- Stop! I think I begin to remember.” “Yes,” she said, breathless,--“yes!” looking at him with supplicating eyes. “Now it comes back to me,” he said. “I--I--am afraid I gave it no importance. There was a baby--yes, a little thing a few weeks, or a few months old--that died.” She sprang up again once more to her feet, menacing, terrible. She was bigger, stronger, far more full of life, than he was. She towered over him, her face full of tragic passion. “It is not true--it is not true!” she cried.