nded the victory which his mother had won on the
field of dishonor and defeat! He was now enabled to reconstruct, by the
aid of his enlightened imagination, a true picture of the events which
she had sketched so imperfectly in those few brief words. He realized
what she must have had to struggle against, and could measure the whole
weight of guilt and despair that must have rested on her heart. He knew
only too well how easy was the road into darkness, and how rugged the
one leading up into the light; yet this frail woman had followed it and
scaled those heights! She had been able to put that past into the
background, and keep it where it belonged. She had hidden her sorrows in
her heart; nothing had daunted her; no discouragement had cast her down.
By a wonderful grace she had concealed her sin from some, and made
others fear even to whisper the knowledge they possessed. She had made
that sin a torch to illumine her future. She had used it as a stepping
stone to ascend into purity and holiness. He could not remember in all
those long years of devotion and of love, that she had ever permitted
him to feel a moment's distrust of her perfect purity and goodness; and
this seemed to him a miracle! That purity and goodness must have been
real! So protracted an hypocrisy would have been impossible. Whence,
then, had she derived the power thus to rise superior to her past? She
had shown its terrific spell over her sensibilities by dying with shame
when she at last proclaimed it, and yet for twenty years she had kept it
under her feet like a writhing dragon, while she calmly fought her
fight. It was incredible, sublime!

As he stood there by her grave, measuring this deep and tragic
experience with his new divining rod of sympathy, there rushed upon him
an overmastering desire to reveal his appreciation to that suffering
heart beyond the skies. A feeling of bitterness at his inability to do
this frenzied him; a new consciousness of the irony of life in
permitting him to make these discoveries when they could do her no good
plunged him suddenly into a struggle with the darker problems of being
which for a little while had ceased to vex him.

"Do all the appreciations of heroism come too late?" he asked his sad
heart. "Do we acquire wisdom only when we, can no longer be guided by
it? Do we achieve self-mastery and real virtue only to be despised by
our children? Where is the clue to this tangle? Oh! mother, mother, if I
could onl