Then, with one strange, gasping cry, she seemed to thrust all consciousness of herself fiercely on one side in her realisation of his great need. In the very crisis of her agony, in the very crisis as it seemed of her defeat, there came upon her a great dignity. “My son,” she said, “there is something in your life of which you have never known--something which accident might have revealed to you at any time, but which I kept from you, hoping that fortune might favour me--as it has done--and preserve your ignorance; believing that in happiness and self-respect lay one of your safeguards, and dreading that knowledge might bring to you some sort of morbid temptation. Julian, it is the toil and struggle of twenty years that you are trampling on in throwing down your life like this. Twenty years ago your father died by his own hand--a swindler, liar, and thief. A few chance words brought home to me the possibility that some such dreadful taint might rest on you. To keep you from its awful consequence; to give you such a life as should obviate the possibility of temptation; to hedge you in with every security that money and position could create for you; to give you such a standing in the world as should leave you nothing to wish for; has been the one thought, the one motive of my life from that time until now.” The speech--so terrible a declaration of a struggle foredoomed by its own essence to failure, a struggle in which the foe was real, the combatant in desperate earnest, and the weapons straws--trembled into an abrupt, palpitating silence, as though her feelings were too intense for speech. There was a moment’s stillness like the stillness of death; a stillness broken only by Julian’s long, laboured breaths as he stood facing her, his face blanched and frozen into an image of horror. Then he spoke. “Is it true?” He had turned mechanically to Dennis Falconer, and the words came from him in a hoarse whisper. Dennis Falconer was white to the lips. Far down in his nature, at the root of the rigid and conventional morality by which he lived, was a pulse which palpitated in harmony with the divine realities of life. And, as like answers to like, that pulse in him had recognised its counterpart at last, through all the cramped distortion that had concealed it for so long, beating full and strong, instinct with the throbbing life of the same great realities, in a dwarfed and darkened woman’s soul. Perfect mother love, absolute self-abnegation, let them clothe themselves in what mistaken form they may, are an earnest of ideal love and beauty, and in their presence condemnation must give place to reverence. Conscious, for the first time in his life, that he stood in the midst of that which was beyond his power to analyse or to estimate, he made no attempt at speech. He bowed his head in silence.