"Why do you hope it?" she asked. "Has my life given you joy--has it sweetened the currents of yours?"

There was a strange wistfulness in her voice, a note of wailing against an inexorable fate. Her words brought before me again the picture of the mother and her child I had seen that day in the woods. Joy! Sweetness! No, my mother had given me but little of these. It was so dim as to be scarcely a memory that when I was a little babe she would press me tenderly to her bosom, would sing to me, would coo over me, as must surely be the fashion of loving mothers with their offspring. It is with no idea of casting reproach upon her that I say she bequeathed to me no legacy of motherly tenderness.

We conversed for nearly an hour. Our conversation was intermittent; there were long pauses in it, and wanderings from one subject to another. This was occasioned by my mother's condition; it was not possible for her to keep her mind upon one theme, and to exhaust it.

"You looked among your father's papers, Gabriel?"

"Yes, mother."

"What did you find?" She seemed to shrink from me as she asked this question.

"Only his Will, and a few unimportant papers."

"Nothing else?"

"Nothing."

"Gabriel," she said, presently, "I wish you to promise me that you will make, in years to come, a faithful record of the circumstances of your life, and of your secret thoughts and promptings." She paused, and when she spoke again appeared to lose sight of the promise she wished to exact from me. "You are sure your father left no special papers for you to read after his death?"

"I found none," I said, much moved at this iteration of a mystery which was evidently weighing heavily upon her.

"Perhaps," she murmured, "he thought silence kindest and wisest."

I strove to keep her mind upon this theme, for I was profoundly agitated by her strange words, but I found it impossible. Her hands moved feebly about the coverlet, her eyes wandered still more restlessly around. My cunningest endeavours failed to woo her back to the subject; her speech became so wild and whirling that I was not ungrateful to Mrs. Fortress when she emerged from behind the curtains, and led me firmly out of the room. I turned on the threshold to look at my 

 Prev. P 26/98 next