How many years lay between those two deaths--and what years! The comparison struck my mother too; she did not speak for a while--then she whispered: "How like him she is!" She bent over the bed, pressed a kiss on the ice-cold brow, and kneeling at the foot of the bed, she prayed. This trying ordeal, of which I had hardly ventured to dream, she herself had sought in so natural, so simple a way. . . . Since then I have had many other tokens of the absolute blamelessness of my mother, I have heard words uttered by him who had contrived and arranged the whole crime, which fully exonerated the noble woman; but there was no need of them. The sight of her kneeling beside the dead sister of my dear father had sufficed to exorcise the phantom. After her prayer, she expressed a wish to remain in the room; but I objected, fearing that the trial would be too severe for her strength, and induced her to go downstairs with me. She was too much affected to sleep, and she begged of me to stay with her for a while. I complied with joy, so afraid was I that when out of her sight I might be revisited by the hallucinations that had been so completely banished by her demeanour. I felt myself once more so entirely her child for this night, that I was in delight with her least actions, her slightest gestures, just as I used to be in my real childhood. I admired the skill with which she instantly transformed the chimney corner of the salon into a quiet little retreat, just the place for a comfortable long talk. She made me arrange the screen so as to shut in the sofa, and place a little table within its shelter; on this she set out her travelling cloak, her smelling-bottle, and my cigarettes. She put on a white dressing-gown, wrapped round her head and shoulders a black-lace mantilla, and when she was settled snugly on the sofa she tucked round her a soft covering of pink wool decked with ribbons. She leaned her cheek on one of the two little red silk cushions that she used in the railway carriage, and inhaled some wood violets which Julie had placed in a little vase. The scent of the flowers mingled with the perfume of her garments and her hair, and I liked to see her thus, to revive my earliest impressions of her by the aid of her refined luxuriousness. Above all I liked her to talk as she now talked, showing her mind to me, and letting so many recollections escape from it. She had begun by questioning me about my aunt's illness, and then she went on to speak of my father. This was very rare with her; it was also rare for her and me to be so familiar and so united. It was a strange sensation to hear her tell the story of her marriage in that salon, filled with the relics of the dead, and with the ever present remembrance of the letters which I had read that day in my mind.