'Yes, but will it be the same? What do I care for the gifts you may bring me when your heart has gone from me? How am I to bear my life when you treat me with such coldness? Cyril, you do not know what a mother's love is. If you had sinned, if you had come to me and said, "Will you take my hand, red as it is with the blood of a fellow-creature?" with all my horror I would still have taken it, for it is the hand of my son.' She spoke with a wild fervour that would have touched any other man; but he only returned coldly: 'And yet you had no mercy for my father?' Then a look of repugnance crossed her face. 'That was because I did not love him. Where there is no love there is no self-sacrifice; but, Cyril, with all my faults, I have been a good mother to you.' 'I know it,' he replied, 'and I hope I shall always do my duty by you; but, mother, you must be patient and give me time. Do you not see,' and here his voice became more agitated, 'that you have yourself destroyed my faith in my mother: the mother in whom I believed, who was truth itself to me, is only my own illusion. I know now that she never existed; that is why I say that you must give me time, that I may become used to my new mother.' He spoke with the utmost gentleness; but his words were dreadful to her. And yet she hardly understood them. How could the pure rectitude, the scrupulous honour, of such a nature be comprehended by a woman like Olive O'Brien, a creature of wild impulses, whose notions of morality were as shifty as the quicksands, whose sense of right and wrong was so strangely warped? For the first time in her life the strong accusing light of conscience seemed to penetrate the murky recesses of her nature with an unearthly radiance that seemed to scorch her into nothingness. Her son had become her judge, and the penalty he imposed was worse than death to her. Of what use would her life be to her if the idol of her heart had turned against her? And yet, with all her remorse and misery, there was no repentance: if the time had come over again, she would still have freed herself from the husband she loathed, she would still have dressed herself in her widows' weeds, and carried out her life's deception. Cyril was perfectly aware of this; he knew all her anguish was caused by his displeasure, and by the bitter consequences that he was reaping. Her plot had failed; it had only brought disaster on him and his. If he could have seen one spark of real repentance--if she had owned to him with tears that her sorrow was for her sin, and that she would fain undo it--his heart would have been softer to her as she sat and wept before him. 'I never thought you could have been so hard to me!' she sobbed. 'I do not mean to be hard,' was his answer; 'that is why I said there should be peace between us, and because I am going away.' 'You are going!--where?' And then he told her briefly that Captain Burnett had offered him a temporary home.