entered the home of her husband,
she there experienced the painful impressions of the past, and the
sombre preoccupations of the future; but she brought with her, although
in a fragile form, a powerful consolation.

Assailed by grief, and ever menaced by new emotion she was obliged to
renounce the nursing of her child; but, nevertheless, she never left
him, for she was jealous even of his nurse. She at least wished to be
loved by him. She loved him with an infinite passion. She loved him
because he was her own son and of her blood. He was the price of her
misfortune--of her pain. She loved him because he was her only hope
of human happiness hereafter. She loved him because she found him as
beautiful as the day. And it was true he was so; for he resembled his
father--and she loved him also on that account. She tried to concentrate
her heart and all her thoughts on this dear creature, and at first she
thought she had succeeded. She was surprised at herself, at her
own tranquillity, when she saw Madame de Campvallon; for her lively
imagination had exhausted, in advance, all the sadness which her new
existence could contain; but when she had lost the kind of torpor into
which excessive suffering had plunged her--when her maternal sensations
were a little quieted by custom, her woman's heart recovered itself in
the mother's. She could not prevent herself from renewing her passionate
interest in her graceful though terrible husband.

Madame de Tecle went to pass two months with her daughter in Paris, and
then returned to the country.

Madame de Camors wrote to her, in the beginning of the following spring,
a letter which gave her an exact idea of the sentiments of the young
woman at the time, and of the turn her domestic life had taken. After a
long and touching detail of the health and beauty of her son Robert, she
added:

"His father is always to me what you have seen him. He spares me
everything he can spare me, but evidently the fatality he has obeyed
continues under the same form. Notwithstanding, I do not despair of
the future, my beloved mother. Since I saw that tear in his eye,
confidence has entered my poor heart. Be assured, my adored mother,
that he will love me one day, if it is only through our child, whom
he begins quietly to love without himself perceiving it. At first,
as you remember, this infant was no more to him than I was. When he
surprised him on my knee, he would give him