Three weeks after the wedding, George De Marke and his wife were established in the home that had been his father’s. For the first time in his life, he had learned the particulars of a domestic drama, which had cast his infancy under the influence of that miserable Frenchwoman, whose sins had at last centred into the meanest and most grinding of all vices. A little week before, this man had deemed himself an isolated being, with no one to love or cling to, except the brother, whose happiness he had resolved to witness, and then become a wanderer again. Now he was at home, settled for life under the roof of ancestors whose very existence had been unknown to him. His mother, whose insanity had taken a gentle and more poetic turn since the death of her enemy, as if even from the distance she had felt the atmosphere of her life relieved of its poison, hovered around him caressingly and with pleasant smiles, for she fancied the husband of her youth had come back again. She no longer shrunk from the picture, which had been returned to its old place on the wall; but would talk to it for hours, evidently substituting its inanimate features for those of her son when he was away. But there was still a shadow upon the life of that young couple: the memory of a child, that had perished, and for which there was forever an unsilenced yearning in the mother’s heart. The proof of its death was so vague, that sometimes wild dreams of its existence forced themselves upon her; and these feelings she had imparted to her husband. One day De Marke had just left Catharine alone in the library, with the sashes of the great bay-window open, when two women came by on their way to the front of the house. One was Mrs. Louis De Marke’s servant, who had disappeared the night after the wedding, and the other a comely little Irish woman, whose face Catharine instantly recognized. She sprang up with an exclamation of pleasant surprise and ran to the window. “Mary Margaret—Mrs. Dillon!” Mary Margaret and her companion turned, and came toward the window. “Oh! is it there ye are, me darlint?” said the good-hearted woman, “with yer husband to the fore, and no thanks to anybody. Faix! but I’m glad to get a sight of yer beautiful countenance agin, and I’ve com’ all the way down here to give ye a taste of happiness that ye haven’t dreamed of. What do you say, darlint, to a child of yer own, just the beautifullest crathur?” “Hush,” said Catharine, bending from the open casement, and reaching out her hand to Mary Margaret. “This is a cruel subject to jest on!” “She isn’t joking, not she,” said Jane Kelly; “I’ve brought her down here, just to strengthen what I have to say, and what I never would have said on earth, if _he_ there hadn’t proved to be another woman’s son. If that old Frenchwoman had been his mother, he might have searched till doomsday, and never found the little fellow after all.