“By the quenched light of those eyes, which I love, by the heart of Gisquette, I speak the truth. I am thy son, and she was my mother!” Claude uttered these words with all the vivacity of a Frenchman. Gutenberg answered not, his bosom heaved painfully--one could see the struggle between mistrust and the wish to believe. “But why----” asked he. “Father,” replied Claude, who perceived at once what was passing in Gutenberg’s mind, “dost thou not yet understand the nature of my mission, why I presented myself to thee, why I followed thee, how it is that I have ended by loving thee as I do, even to adoration? And dost thou not guess how I was bound by my mother, by a solemn oath, never to utter a single word that could recall her to thy memory, until thou thyself hadst in some manner named her?--‘Be, if it must be so, his most humble attendant, for he is thy father; and if thou findest Gutenberg in prosperity, which I pray Heaven he may be, and he has forgotten the days at Aix-la-Chapelle, oh, do not invoke the shade of poor Gisquette to place it between him and happiness! But if he is in trouble he will of himself think of me; then fall at his feet, kiss the ground he treads on, and say to him, Be comforted, it is _she_ who sends thy son to thee!’” “Enough, enough, by the Holy Saviour, enough!” cried Gutenberg, straining in his arms the young man who still knelt before him. “Yes, it is she herself! I recognize her in those words, my son! my child!” A thunderbolt would not have separated those two men clasped together. The old man, although unable to look upon the son who had been given to him, uttered no complaint; his lips, his hands, his arms, were as so many eyes to him. “Before I knew,” said Gutenberg, “the treasure I possessed in thee, I recollect tracing in the frank and amiable expression of thy face something of my Gisquette.” When they had recovered themselves a little from their first emotion, Gutenberg became sufficiently calm to speak to Claude of his mother. He could not see the eyes of the young man raised to heaven, but, in the outburst of grief with which he threw himself into his father’s arms--“I understand,” he said; “she awaits me there--above!” Lawrence Beildech, on his return from the fields, found the old man and Claude still sitting happily side by side. “Lawrence,” cried Gutenberg, whose step he had recognized, “Lawrence, I have found a son!”