“Do as I have done, my child,” said her mother. “Be gentle and kind, and your conscience will be at peace. On his death-bed a man may say, ‘My wife has never cost me a pang!’ And God, who hears that dying breath, credits it to us. If I had abandoned myself to fury like you, what would have happened? Your father would have been embittered, perhaps he would have left me altogether, and he would not have been withheld by any fear of paining me. Our ruin, utter as it now is, would have been complete ten years sooner, and we should have shown the world the spectacle of a husband and wife living quite apart--a scandal of the most horrible, heart-breaking kind, for it is the destruction of the family. Neither your brother nor you could have married. “I sacrificed myself, and that so bravely, that, till this last connection of your father’s, the world has believed me happy. My serviceable and indeed courageous falsehood has, till now, screened Hector; he is still respected; but this old man’s passion is taking him too far, that I see. His own folly, I fear, will break through the veil I have kept between the world and our home. However, I have held that curtain steady for twenty-three years, and have wept behind it--motherless, I, without a friend to trust, with no help but in religion--I have for twenty-three years secured the family honor----” Hortense listened with a fixed gaze. The calm tone of resignation and of such crowning sorrow soothed the smart of her first wound; the tears rose again and flowed in torrents. In a frenzy of filial affection, overcome by her mother’s noble heroism, she fell on her knees before Adeline, took up the hem of her dress and kissed it, as pious Catholics kiss the holy relics of a martyr. “Nay, get up, Hortense,” said the Baroness. “Such homage from my daughter wipes out many sad memories. Come to my heart, and weep for no sorrows but your own. It is the despair of my dear little girl, whose joy was my only joy, that broke the solemn seal which nothing ought to have removed from my lips. Indeed, I meant to have taken my woes to the tomb, as a shroud the more. It was to soothe your anguish that I spoke.--God will forgive me! “Oh! if my life were to be your life, what would I not do? Men, the world, Fate, Nature, God Himself, I believe, make us pay for love with the most cruel grief. I must pay for ten years of happiness and twenty-four years of despair, of ceaseless sorrow, of bitterness--” “But you had ten years, dear mamma, and I have had but three!” said the self-absorbed girl. “Nothing is lost yet,” said Adeline. “Only wait till Wenceslas comes.” “Mother,” said she, “he lied, he deceived me. He said, ‘I will not go,’ and he went. And that over his child’s cradle.”