Every detail of all that passed that evening served to prove to me how basely my puerile and disgraceful fancies had calumniated her who ought to have been sacred in my sight. Julie had prepared a sort of supper, and wished to attend at table herself. I observed the former mistress and the old servant brought thus face to face, and, although I knew that they had not got on well together in past days, I saw that they were well pleased to meet again. Poor Julie especially, who was a simple creature, incapable of deceit or dissimulation, was so glad that she took me aside a few minutes before the meal, to tell me what a consolation it was to her in her grief to see my mother so kind and affectionate to me, and to wait on us both at the same table, as in the bygone time. Had there been in my mother's past life any of those guilty secrets which faithful servants are more quick than any others to divine, the honest and true-hearted woman who had tended both my father and myself would neither have been ignorant of it nor capable of condoning it. I should have detected the trace of it in her wrinkled face with the drawn-in lips, for its every wrinkle spoke eloquently to me. Nor would my mother have been pleased and easy in the presence of this witness of a sin of the past; her manner would have betrayed a secret disturbance, were it only by the haughtiness with which, as it were, one repels the silent censure of an inferior by anticipation. Julie's face made one among the many things which recalled her first marriage to my mother's mind; and, either because the almost sudden death of my aunt had deeply moved her, or because this sentimental recurrence to the past was an indulgence of her taste for the romantic, far from avoiding such recollections, she yielded to them fully, while I silently blessed her for thus destroying the last vestiges of my mute calumny. How fervent was my mental thanksgiving, when, later in the night, she asked to see my dear dead aunt, so that she might take a last farewell of her! We entered the room where the dying woman had striven with the last earthly solicitude from which I had drawn such black conclusions. Death had strengthened the resemblance that existed in her lifetime between my aunt and my father. The motionless face forcibly recalled that other face still living in my sad memory, and in whose presence my mother had clasped me in so warm an embrace; and the resemblance was made more striking by the chin-cloth which kept the mouth closed. Once more we stood side by side before a funereal spectacle; but I was no longer a child, and my mother was no longer a young woman.