rhaps--till who could say how much the world might be benefited and
helped just because they two had loved!

And then she told him--sweetly, as a mother should--of all her dreams
for her son--all her hopes and ambitions that were centered around his
little life--the life of her son who was to redeem the land--told him
how ennobled and exalted she had felt that this strong, manly Englishman
was her lover, and how sure she had been that their child would have a
noble mind.

"Thou wilt think my thoughts, my baby Paul--thou wilt dream my
dreams, and know all my ambitions and longings. Thou canst not be
ignoble or base, for thou wert born of a love that makes all other
unions mean and low and sordid by comparison."

Then, after telling, as only she could tell it, of the bitterness of
that parting in Venice, when, because of the threatening danger, from
which there was no escape, she left her lover to save his life, she went
on:

"Dost thou know yet, when thou readest this, little Paul, with thy
father's eyes--dost thou know, I wonder, the meaning of that great
love which to the twain who realize it becomes a sacrament--dost
understand?--a sacrament holier even than a prayer. It was even so
with thy father and me--dost thou--canst thou understand? If not
yet, sometime thou wilt, and thou wilt then forgive thy mother for
her sin."

She told of the taunts and persecutions to which she was forced to
submit upon her return to her kingdom. The king and his friends had
vilely commended her for her "patriotism" in finding an heir to the
throne. "Napoleon would have felt honored," her husband had sneered, "if
Josephine had adopted thy method of finding him the heir he desired!"
But through it all, she said, she had not faltered. She had held the one
thought supreme in her heart and remembered that however guilty she
might be in the eyes of the world, there was a higher truth in the words
of Mrs. Browning, "God trusts me with a child," and had dared to pray.

"To pray for strength and grace and wisdom to give thee birth, my
baby, and to make thee all that thou shouldst be--to develop thee
into the man I and thy father would have thee become. I was not
only giving an heir to the throne of my realm. I was giving a son
to the husband of my soul. But the world did not know that.
Whatever it might suspect, it could actually know--nothing! The
s