ed weaker than herself. "But if it could be, my husband?"--her voice
growing unsteady. "Humor me this one time: I have looked forward to it
so long! Perhaps it was to remember my own childhood; perhaps I had some
little gifts to offer you. But let me keep it. If it be childish, let me
be a child."

Something in the broken voice reminded him of little Tom's. She put her
hands on his arms, too, and in the thin face turned up to his there was
a look left by all the years of patient love and work she had borne for
him; it struck him back somehow, as by a touch, to those first days when
they were lovers together in Canada. It was curious, that, in after
years, when M. Jacobus remembered his wife, it was always as she looked
at that last moment.

"Don't think me harsh, Sharley," he faltered.

She caught at her advantage. "We will keep it together,"--eagerly.

He thrust her hands from his arms, and went about the room with long,
unsteady strides.

"I cannot lie to God! I cannot lie!" he said.

His wife, seeing his face, when he turned, cried hurriedly,--

"It is a trifle; let it go, Jerome. I can give you my little gifts all
the same; it is a trifle."

Down below his credulous simplicity and the weight of borrowed ideas
with which books had loaded his brain, (borrowed infidelity with the
rest,) M. Jacobus was a sturdy, honest man, with a keen sense of honor:
it was no trifle to him. She saw that some rough touch of hers had
reached a secret depth of his soul never bared to her before.

"What is it, Jerome?"--coming up to catch him again with her trembling
hand. "It is to me a matter of so little import!"

He stopped.

"It is this to me. She did keep it,--my mother. It is my first
remembrance of our home,--when she was dead. We children made yet a
feast upon that day, that she might look back and see. Now that I am no
longer a child, and know that she can never look back, that what was my
mother is but a heap of bones and dust, I--I cannot keep the day."

She stood in his way.

"Dead is dead!" he cried, fiercely, "When I know that she and the child
I loved cannot speak or look at me more than this stone at my feet, I
cannot believe in the day on which you say He came to bring eternal
life."

"There is nothing more alive to me than my little Tom. I'm sorry you do
not feel it so, Jerome," said matter-of-fact Charlotte. "I was not what
you call a religious woman before he died; and when better thoughts come
to me