cene
occurred. In that moment of her peril, when every eye frowned with
death, a little timid boy pressed forth, and threw his arms round his
mother.

"I am here, mother, it is I, and I will go with thee to prison," he
exclaimed.

She gazed at him with a doubtful and almost frightened expression, for
she knew that the boy had been cast out to perish, and she had not hoped
to see his face again. She feared, perhaps, that it was but one of the
happy visions, with which her excited fancy had often deceived her, in
the solitude of the desert or in prison. But when she felt his hand warm
within her own, and heard his little eloquence of childish love, she
began to know that she was yet a mother.

"Blessed art thou, my son," she sobbed. "My heart was withered; yea,
dead with thee and with thy father; and now it leaps as in the first
moment when I pressed thee to my bosom."

She kneeled down and embraced him again and again, while the joy that
could find no words expressed itself in broken accents, like the bubbles
gushing up to vanish at the surface of a deep fountain. The sorrows of
past years, and the darker peril that was nigh, cast not a shadow on the
brightness of that fleeting moment. Soon, however, the spectators saw a
change upon her face, as the consciousness of her sad estate returned,
and grief supplied the fount of tears which joy had opened. By the words
she uttered, it would seem that the indulgence of natural love had given
her mind a momentary sense of its errors, and made her know how far she
had strayed from duty, in following the dictates of a wild fanaticism.

"In a doleful hour art thou returned to me, poor boy," she said, "for
thy mother's path has gone darkening onward, till now the end is death.
Son, son, I have borne thee in my arms when my limbs were tottering, and
I have fed thee with the food that I was fainting for; yet I have ill
performed a mother's part by thee in life, and now I leave thee no
inheritance but woe and shame. Thou wilt go seeking through the world,
and find all hearts closed against thee, and their sweet affections
turned to bitterness for my sake. My child, my child, how many a pang
awaits thy gentle spirit and I the cause of all!"

She hid her face on Ilbrahim's head, and her long raven hair, discolored
with the ashes of her mourning, fell down about him like a veil. A low
and interrupted moan was the voice of her heart's anguish, and it did
not fail to move the sympathi