"I feel pride when I think of the services that I have rendered him. He had another fall from his horse not long after, or rather, again urging the animal down a precipice, it fell. He was underneath, and his leg was broken. During the long confinement that ensued, I was his faithful nurse and companion. Naturally lively, yet I could sympathize in his sorrows. By degrees I won his confidence. He told me all his story--all his feelings. He grew mild and soft under my influence. He grew to regret that he had been vanquished by adversity so as to become almost what he was accused of being, a frantic idiot. As he talked of his mother, and the care she bestowed on his early years, he wept to think how unlike he was to the creature she had wished him to become. A desire to reform, to repair past faults, to school himself, grew out of such talk. He threw off his sullenness and gloom. He became studious at the same time that he grew gentle. His education, which had proceeded but badly while he refused to lend his mind to improvement, was now the object of his own thoughts and exertions. Instead of careering wildly over the hills, or being thrown under some tree delivered up to miserable revery, he asked for masters, and was continually seen with a book in his hands. "The passion of his soul still subsisted, modulated by his new feelings. He continued to believe in the innocence of his mother, though he often doubted her existence. He longed inexpressibly to unveil the mystery that shrouded her fate. He devoted himself in his heart to discovering the truth. He resolved to occupy his whole life in the dear task of reinstating her in that cloudless purity of reputation which he intimately felt she had never deserved to forfeit. He considered the promise exacted from him by his father as preventing him from following up his design, and as binding him till he was twenty-one. Till then he deferred his endeavours. No young spendthrift ever aspired for the attainment of the age of freedom and the possession of an estate as vehemently as did Gerard for the hour which was to permit him to deliver himself wholly up to this task. "Before that time arrived I married. I wished to take him abroad with us; but the unfounded (as I believe) notion that the secret of his mother's fate is linked to the English shores made him dislike to leave his native country. It was only on our return that he consented to come as far as Marseilles to meet us.