"Do they know already?" she asked, as she straightened herself, and, reaching up, took his head between her hands. He nodded, and kissed the fingers that glided over his cheeks with an anxious touch. Then a new wave of joy overpowered her. She put the candle on the stairs, and, cowering beside it, she covered her face with her hands wept bitterly. He was seized with a sense of shame; all this love and longing had been waiting for him, and he, with a brutal thirst for seeing life, had simply turned his back on it and gone his way. He bent over her and half consciously and half absently stroked the crochet edging of her nightcap, from which the grey hair escaped in scanty little curls. Another light cast its radiance from the back of the hall, and an infirm old figure came forward trembling and hesitating. His mother dropped her hands, and, laughing through her tears, called out-- "Come, Christian, come. Don't be frightened, you stupid fellow. It really is he. Look at him, and see for yourself that it is." The old butler, arrayed in Leo's old dressing-gown and Leo's old slippers, in his joy and astonishment let candle and matches fall with a crash on the floor. Tender and servile, half slave and half father, he bent over the master's hand, wiping away nervously his fast-falling tears. A fresh feeling of shame took possession of Leo. "What a wonderful thing was the faithful soul of such old servants!" he thought. "No matter how you might have bullied and abused them all your life, they still clung to you and worshipped you as a god." And then aloud he said, "That's enough now. Christian; we shall have other opportunities of rejoicing together. Go and let the dogs loose, or the brutes will go mad." The old man wrapped his dressing-gown over his poor aged ribs, which had been exposed in the excitement of the moment, and withdrew on tottering legs without saying a word. Meanwhile the mother had begun to be ashamed of her outer woman, and after she had kindled a light in the garden-salon, she hurried away to put on a dress, still undecided between laughing and crying. Leo was alone. The hanging lamp, which he had seen earlier casting a glory about the heads of the two young girls, seemed to greet him with its light. Half his life, his dreams, his happiness, and his sins--all were associated with this flame, which had shone upon his youth like some dear silent confidential friend. He walked round the table with striding steps. In the middle of it was the old majolica vase with open dragons' jaws, where a bunch of _gloire de Dijon_ roses languished exhausted from the heat of the day. Knitting and an album lay beside it, and on top the lady cook's account-book, which she was in the habit of leaving here open when she went to bed. So it had been thirty years ago; so it was to-day.