The war of the elements outside increased in demoniac fury. The lightning flashed, the thunder pealed, the rain drove in torrents against the walls, but blind and deaf to it all the one woman lay shuddering with her face in the pillows, the other sat in her chair, her eyes agleam with somber light, her face pallid, her lips curled with some strange, overmastering emotion. Suddenly she leaned forward, and almost rudely shook the woman among the pillows. Fire flashed from her splendid Oriental eyes, burning words leaped to her lips: “Mrs. Murray, I am ashamed of you!” she cried angrily. “You are his mother, yet you can believe this cruel thing of your noble son! Then you never loved him, never! But I--I loved him, and I denounce this letter as a forgery, a black and cruel falsehood!” Those passionate reproaches broke upon the elder woman’s senses with the force of an electric shock. Wildly she sprang upright, wildly she looked at the beautiful young creature who had torn in a hundred pieces that fatal letter, and flung them in a fury of scorn upon the velvet carpet. Italy had sprung from her chair and was standing over her, her lips quivering with feeling, her eyes flashing. “I had not believed this of you, Mrs. Murray,” she repeated reproachfully. “Did you not know him as the soul of kindliness, truth, and honor? Was he not your boy, your Frank, whose sunny curls lay on your breast in infancy, your son, whose strong arms supported your declining years so gently? Tell me--did you ever know Francis Murray to be guilty of one unworthy or ignoble action?” “No, oh, no, no!” cried out the startled woman eagerly. “You did not? In all his thirty-three years of life? Yet you could listen to the slanderer’s tale; you could credit this cruel forgery! Oh, Mrs. Murray! I am ashamed of your credulity!” flashed out Italy, with stormy emotion. The elder woman caught her breath pantingly, and a gleam of light flashed into her sunken, hopeless eyes. “Get up from that bed, Mrs. Murray, for you must not die yet; you must live! live to hunt down the black-hearted schemer who plotted this vile deed! live to welcome your son back when he returns to brand this falsehood as a device of Satan!” Oh! the light of hope that flashed into the hopeless eyes, the color that flushed the frozen cheek of the woman who had been dying one moment before of sheer despair and shame! She rose from the bed unaided--she who just now felt too weak to raise her hands--she fell on her knees and clasped Italy Vale with adoring arms, lifting to her a face radiant with joy. She cried eagerly: “You _believe_ in him? you take his part! _you_, whom I expected to denounce him, and to rejoice that he was proved guilty that your mother’s memory might be cleared! Girl, girl! you are an angel!” And Italy, stooping, pressed a reverent kiss on the gray hair of the woman kneeling in humble gratitude at her feet.