These relics were puerile, even ridiculous perhaps, and yet, when we remember that all the incidents of her son's life with which these articles were associated had been important, touching, or deeply solemn events to this young mother living in complete solitude and idolising her son, we can forgive this worship of the past and also understand the feeling that had prompted her to place among these relics a small porcelain lamp, by the subdued light of which the mother had watched over her son during a long and dangerous illness from which his life had been saved by a modest but clever physician of Pont Brillant. It is almost needless to say, too, that the walls of the room were ornamented with frames containing here a page of infantile, almost unformed handwriting, there a couple of verses which the youth had composed for his mother's birthday the year before. Besides there were the inevitable heads of Andromache and of Niobe, upon which the inexperienced crayon of the beginner usually bestows such drawn mouths and squinting eyes, apparently gazing in a sort of sullen surprise at a pretty water-colour representing a scene on the banks of the Loire; while the lad's first books were no less carefully preserved by the mother in a bookcase containing some admirably chosen works on history, geography, travel, and literature. A piano, a music-rack, and a drawing-table completed the modest furnishings of the room. Late in the month of June, Marie Bastien--for that was the name of this young mother--found herself in this room with her son. It was nearly five o'clock in the afternoon, and the golden rays of the declining sun, though obstructed to some extent by the slats of the Venetian blinds, were, nevertheless, playing a lively game of hide-and-seek, now with the dark woodwork, now with the big bouquets of fresh flowers in the china vases on the mantel. A dozen or more superb half-open roses in a tall glass vase diffused a delightful perfume through the room, and brightened the table covered with books and papers, on either side of which the mother and son were busily writing. Madame Bastien, though she was thirty-one years of age, did not look a day over twenty, so radiant was her enchanting face with youthful, we might almost say, virginal freshness, for the angelic beauty of this young woman seemed worthy to inspire the words so often addressed to the Virgin, "Hail, Mary, full of grace."