These were pangs they endured in common; but each had besides her solitary burden of pain. That of the mother was tinged with something like the bitterness of remorse. She had been wroth with her boy for deceiving her and betraying the cause she held dearer than life. Pride and anger had kept her back from obeying the first impulse of her heart when she heard of him as amongst the conscripts who left the village. She thought of hastening after him to Paris, that he might not go forth to die without his mother’s pardon and her blessing. But she put the thought aside. The difficulties in her way would have been very great, yet it was not these that deterred her. It was the persuasion that he did not deserve this sacrifice at her hands--that the first step towards a reconciliation ought to come from him. If he wished for it, why had he not written?--But now everything was changed. With vain tears that had no healing in them the broken-hearted mother mourned over “the irrevocable past.” Clémence too had her lonely sorrow. Deeply thoughtful and truly pious, after the strong, stern, self-sacrificing Jansenist fashion, she knew too well that her brother’s young heart had never truly surrendered itself to its Creator and Redeemer. The “Except ye be converted” of the Divine Teacher held as real a place in the creed of Clémence as in that of any Protestant; nor, under the circumstances, could the Catholic belief in sacramentary grace interpose its soft, misleading glamour between her eyes and the truth. So her soul went down to the depths of a sorrow without hope; depths that few are strong enough to sound, and those who do sound them seldom tell what they find there. Some, it may be, bring back from thence secrets of divine love, “treasures of the deep that lieth under,” worth all they have passed through to learn them. But it was not so with Clémence. She brought no pearls with her from the deeps of ocean. It was much if she herself came back, or rather _drifted_ back, forlorn and weary, because mind and body were no longer strong enough to bear the strain of intense emotion. She said in her heart,--as poor Henri thought she would do all too easily,--“It is the will of God;” but she never truly said, “Thy will be done.” Perhaps she made her heavy burden heavier by asking from herself what God never asked from her; forgetting that it is _not_ his will that any sinner should perish, and that Christ himself wept tears of divine compassion over lost souls. So her own faith grew dim and clouded, until even the sense of personal love to God seemed to vanish away, and with it the trust in his love to her; for, unhappily, her creed did _not_ teach her that his love to his chosen and adopted is “everlasting.”