Who but a mother could weep as she did?
Who but a mother forget everything else in the abandonment of
her sorrow, and remember only the dead?
Before he looked up, he knew it was Dora--the mother bereft of
her child--the mother clasping in her loving arms the child she
had nursed, watched, and loved for so many years. She gazed at
him, and he never forgot the woeful, weeping face.
"Ronald," she cried, "I trusted my darling to you; what has
happened to her?"
The first words for many long years--the first since he had
turned round upon her in his contempt, hoping he might be
forgiven for having made her his wife.
She seemed to forget him then, and laid her head down upon the
quiet heart; but Ronald went round to her. He raised her in his
arms, he laid the weeping face on his breast, he kissed away the
blinding tears, and she cried to him:
"Forgive me, Ronald--forgive me! You can not refuse in the hour
of death."
How the words smote him. They were his own recoiling upon him.
How often he had refused his mother's pleading--hardened his own
heart, saying to himself and to her that he could not pardon her
yet--he would forgive her in the hour of death, when either he
or she stood on the threshold of eternity!
Heaven had not willed it so.
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