They had humored him, and for three long hours he had knelt by
her, bidding her a sorrowful farewell, taking his last look at the face
that would never again smile on earth for him.

They respected the bitterness of his uncontrollable sorrow; no idle
words of sympathy were offered to him; men passed him by with an
averted face--women with tearful eyes.

Lord Earle was alone with his dead child. In a little while nothing
would remain of his beautiful, brilliant daughter but a memory and a
name. He did not weep; his sorrow lay too deep for tears. In his
heart he was asking pardon for the sins and follies of his youth; his
face was buried in his hands, his head bowed over the silent form of
his loved child; and when the door opened gently, he never raised his
eyes--he was only conscious that some one entered the room, and walked
swiftly up the gloomy, darkened chamber to the bedside. Then a
passionate wailing that chilled his very blood filled the rooms.

"My Beatrice, my darling! Why could I not have died for you?"

Some one bent over the quiet figure, clasping it in tender arms,
calling with a thousand loving words upon the dear one who lay
there--some one whose voice fell like a strain of long-forgotten music
upon his ears. 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 sto