"It was I who was blind," he cried, "and you who saw--who saw prophetically. Without you, where should I have been now?--An orphan without a future, without a home; banished from the only hearts I love, and by my own miserable delusions. And now--now they are all my own again; mine and more than I ever believed to be mine--more than I could have trusted myself to possess." She hung upon his neck in mute devotion; mute for very scorn of the poverty of language. The long repressed fervour of her affection had broken loose, and burned in her silent kiss. Day dawned upon their happiness. Now he knew what she had so obstinately concealed, and what this very room had witnessed; where now, pledged to each other for life, with a grasp of each other's hands, they parted in the early morning. In the course of the day a letter came from Wolf, written the night before, from the nearest village. Clement might be at rest, he wrote; he retracted everything; he knew best that what he had said was nonsense. He had spoken in anger and in wine. It had provoked him to see Clement going about so indifferent and cool, when, with a word, he might have taken possession of such a treasure--and when he saw that Clement really did mean to do so, he had reviled what had been denied to him. He begged Clement not to think worse of him than he deserved, and to make his excuses to the young girl and to his parents; and not to break with him entirely, and for ever. When Clement read this to Marlene, she was rather touched: "I can be sorry for him now," she said; "though I always felt uneasy when he was here--and how much he might have spared us both, and spared himself! But I can think of him with charity now--we have so much to thank him for!"-- WALTER'S LITTLE MOTHER. WALTER'S LITTLE MOTHER. On a still spring night, that had followed on a stormy day, a young woman sat alone by her little lamp, watching and wakeful, although in every other room of that old house, the lights had been put out above an hour before. It was in a narrow street of a little northern town, and not a footstep was to be heard, save the watchman's, who stopped from time to time, under the one lighted window, to sing out with especial emphasis, his warning to be careful of fire and light. The casement was not closed, and the lamp flickered in the night wind, that blew chill into the room, stealing as it passed, the fragrance of the hyacinths that were blooming in the window. But the girl did not close the casement; she only drew her large brown shawl still closer about her shoulders, and remained pensively looking over the book on her lap, towards the sleeping town beyond; listening to the clock upon the tower as it struck the successive quarters.