"Soon one of our women heard my boy shouting, and laughing at the other child who could not shout; and instead of tempting them in with a sweetmeat, the thoughtless girl ran after them. Of course they ran away, and before she could catch them, both vanished over the brink of the cliff, where a crest of snow obscured it; and verily she was afraid to go back to the house, and tell what she had done. She concealed herself behind the corner, and left others to find out the loss. But it was not very long unknown, for Marva was coming along the ravine upon her return to Karthlos, in the teleka which had brought her first, and which she kept at the posting-house. She saw the two children lying there after their fall of two hundred feet, her own child unhurt in a pile of snow, and my little darling on the rocky floor, with his poor head dashed to pieces. "For her bitter turn against me, I forgave her, when I heard of her tenderness to my poor child. It is at such times that the greatness of a woman's nature shows itself. Happily she knew not as yet of my encounter with her husband, which must have been taking place just then, but forgetting all her grievances against me she took both little ones into her carriage, and drove at all speed to the posting-house. There she ordered a private room, and allowed no one to come near them, except her own Baboushka, while she sent to a village five miles off for the only doctor to be heard of. He came as soon as he could, but she had abandoned all hope by that time, as any but a woman must have done long since, and there was no one to receive him. For Marva had sent her own child home in dread of the effect upon his little brain, and at night she appeared at the gate of Karthlos, with the baby heir cold as a stone in her arms. His pretty red cross, and his green velvet dress, and above all the billows of his golden hair still flowing from the linen swathes of Death--when the women saw these they bewailed the child of Imar and of Oria, almost as if they had lost their own. Before my return, he was buried in our little churchyard of the glen; and his mother lies beside him. "I have told you a melancholy tale; but when the Lord has tried one child beyond His other children, and almost beyond the strength vouchsafed to the best of them to bear it, something good shall be yet in store; and happiness may spring up again, though pleasure be but a memory. And the soul that has passed through rough affliction and the long cold shadow, is led more kindly into the paths of shelter, and content with quietude.