h or discriminate.
Nature gave way. She knelt upon the floor before him, her hands
clasped, tears coursing down her cheeks. But of her attitude and aspect
she was unconscious.

"Oh, Richard, Richard!" she cried, "forgive me. Curse me, my dearest,
throw all the blame on me, my dearest--I accept it--not on God. Only
try, try to forgive! Forgive me for being your mother. Forgive me that
I ever loved and married. Forgive me the intolerable wrong which, all
unknowingly, I did you before your birth. I humble myself before you,
and with reason. For I am the cause, I, who would give my life for your
happiness, my blood for your healing, a thousand times. But through all
these years I have done my poor best to serve you and to make up. The
hypocrisies and subterfuges which you lash so scornfully--and rightly
perhaps--were the fruit of my overcare for you. Rail at me. I deserve
it. Perhaps I have been faithless, but only once or twice, and for a
moment. I was faithless towards you here, in the garden to-night. But
then I supposed you content. Ah! I hardly know what I say!--Only rail
at me, my beloved, not at God. And then try--try not to leave me in
anger. Try, before you go, to forgive!"

Richard had sunk back in his chair, his hands clasped under his head,
watching her. It gave him the strangest sensation to see his mother
kneeling before him thus. At first it shocked him almost to the point
of heated protest, as against a thing unpermissible and indecorous.
Then the devils of wounded pride, of anarchy, and of revolt asserting
themselves, he began to relish, to be appeased by, the unseemly sight.
Little Lady Constance Quayle, and all that of which she was the symbol,
had disappointed and escaped him. But here was a woman, worth a dozen
Constance Quayles, in beauty, in intellect, and in heart, prostrate
before him, imploring his clemency as the penitent implores the
absolution of the priest! An evil gladness took him that he had power
thus to subjugate so regal a creature. His gluttony of inflicting
pain--since he himself suffered--his gluttony of exercising
dominion--since he himself had been defied and defrauded--was in a
degree satisfied. His arrogance was at once reinforced and assuaged.

"It is absurd to speak of forgiveness," he said presently, and slowly,
"as it is absurd to speak of restitution. These are mere words, having
no real tally in fact. We appear to have volition, but actually and
essentially we are as leave