ed the painful impressions of the past, and the sombre
preoccupations of the future; but she brought with her, although in a
fragile form, a powerful consolation.

Assailed by grief, and ever menaced by new emotion she was obliged to
renounce the nursing of her child; but, nevertheless, she never left him,
for she was jealous even of his nurse. She at least wished to be loved by
him. She loved him with an infinite passion. She loved him because he was
her own son and of her blood. He was the price of her misfortune--of her
pain. She loved him because he was her only hope of human happiness
hereafter. She loved him because she found him as beautiful as the day.
And it was true he was so; for he resembled his father--and she loved him
also on that account. She tried to concentrate her heart and all her
thoughts on this dear creature, and at first she thought she had
succeeded. She was surprised at herself, at her own tranquillity, when
she saw Madame de Campvallon; for her lively imagination had exhausted,
in advance, all the sadness which her new existence could contain; but
when she had lost the kind of torpor into which excessive suffering had
plunged her--when her maternal sensations were a little quieted by
custom, her woman's heart recovered itself in the mother's. She could not
prevent herself from renewing her passionate interest in her graceful
though terrible husband.

Madame de Tecle went to pass two months with her daughter in Paris, and
then returned to the country.

Madame de Camors wrote to her, in the beginning of the following spring,
a letter which gave her an exact idea of the sentiments of the young
woman at the time, and of the turn her domestic life had taken. After a
long and touching detail of the health and beauty of her son Robert, she
added:

"His father is always to me what you have seen him. He spares me
everything he can spare me, but evidently the fatality he has obeyed
continues under the same form. Notwithstanding, I do not despair of
the future, my beloved mother. Since I saw that tear in his eye,
confidence has entered my poor heart. Be assured, my adored mother,
that he will love me one day, if it is only through our child, whom
he begins quietly to love without himself perceiving it. At first,
as you remember, this infant was no more to him than I was. When he
surprised him on my knee, he would give him a cold kiss, say,
'Good-morning, Monsieur,' and w