riguer at Coblenz was blotted out,
together with every other consideration--thrust out of a consciousness
that could find room for nothing else beside the fact that she stood
acknowledged by her only son, this child begotten in adultery, borne
furtively and in shame in a remote Brittany village eight-and-twenty
years ago. Not even a thought for the betrayal of that inviolable
secret, or the consequences that might follow, could she spare in this
supreme moment.

She took one or two faltering steps towards him, hesitating. Then she
opened her arms. Sobs suffocated her voice.

"Won't you come to me, Andre-Louis?"

A moment yet he stood hesitating, startled by that appeal, angered
almost by his heart's response to it, reason and sentiment at grips
in his soul. This was not real, his reason postulated; this poignant
emotion that she displayed and that he experienced was fantastic. Yet he
went. Her arms enfolded him; her wet cheek was pressed hard against his
own; her frame, which the years had not yet succeeded in robbing of its
grace, was shaken by the passionate storm within her.

"Oh, Andre-Louis, my child, if you knew how I have hungered to hold you
so! If you knew how in denying myself this I have atoned and suffered!
Kercadiou should not have told you--not even now. It was wrong--most
wrong, perhaps, to you. It would have been better that he should have
left me here to my fate, whatever that may be. And yet--come what may of
this--to be able to hold you so, to be able to acknowledge you, to hear
you call me mother--oh! Andre-Louis, I cannot now regret it. I cannot...
I cannot wish it otherwise."

"Is there any need, madame?" he asked her, his stoicism deeply shaken.
"There is no occasion to take others into our confidence. This is for
to-night alone. To-night we are mother and son. To-morrow we resume our
former places, and, outwardly at least, forget."

"Forget? Have you no heart, Andre-Louis?"

The question recalled him curiously to his attitude towards life--that
histrionic attitude of his that he accounted true philosophy. Also he
remembered what lay before them; and he realized that he must master not
only himself but her; that to yield too far to sentiment at such a time
might be the ruin of them all.

"It is a question propounded to me so often that it must contain the
truth," said he. "My rearing is to blame for that."

She tightened her clutch about his neck even as he would have attempted
to disen