When in the light of the hot, strong sun I saw how in those ten years my mother had grown old--old, bent, broken, white-haired, in those ten years that had been all glow and glitter, and pleasure and pastime, and movement and mirth to me--then I knew that I had sinned against her with a mighty sin--a sin of cruelty, of neglect, of selfish wickedness. She had been young still when I had left her--young and fair to look at, and without a silver line in her ebon hair, and with suitors about her for her beauty like bees about the blossoms of the ivy in the autumn-time. And now--now she was quite old. She never rebuked me: she only said, "My son! my son! God be praised!" and said that a thousand times, weeping and trembling. Some women are like this. When the bright, burning midsummer day had grown into a gray, firefly-lighted night, I laid me down on the narrow bed where I had slept as a child, and my mother kissed me as though I were a child. It seemed to purify me from all the sins of all the absent years, except, indeed, of that one unpardonable sin against her. In the morning she opened the drawers of an old bureau and showed me everything I had sent her all those years: all was untouched, the money as well as the presents. "I took nothing while you did not give me yourself," she said. I felt my throat choke. It was early day: she asked me to go to mass with her. I did so to please her. All the while I watched her bent, feeble, aged figure and the white hair under the yellow kerchief, and felt as if I had killed her. This lone old creature was not the mother like Raffaelle's Madonna I had left: I could never make her again what she had been. "It is my son," she said to her neighbors, but she said it with pain rather than with pride, for she hated my calling; but Orte was of another way of thinking. Orte flocked to see me, having heard of Pipistrello, its own Pipistrello, who had plagued it with his childish tricks, having grown into fame amongst the cities and villages as the strongest man in all Italy. For indeed I was that; and my mother, with dim, tear-laden eyes, looked at me and said, "You are the image of your father. Oh, my dear, my love! take care." She, poor soul! saw nothing but the fall she had seen that day at Genoa of a strong man who dropped like a stone. But I fear to weary you. Well! I had left my spangled dress and all insignia of my calling with my comrades at the wine-shop, fearing to harass my mother by sight of all those things which would be so full of bitter recollection and dread to her. But Orte clamored for me to show it my powers--Orte, which was more than half asleep by Tiber's side, like that nymph Canens whom I used to read of in my Latin school-books--Orte, which had no earthly thing to do this long and lazy day in the drought of a rainless June.