happiness you owe them. Motherhood has
sometimes been too weak a power in my heart; yes, I have sometimes
wished I were not a mother, that I might be closer to your soul, your
life! And now, to stifle my remorse, must I plead the cause of my
children before you, and not my own?"

Her hair fell loose and floated over her shoulders, her eyes shot forth
her feelings as though they had been arrows. She triumphed over her
rival. Balthazar lifted her, carried her to the sofa, and knelt at her
feet.

"Have I caused you such grief?" he said, in the tone of a man waking
from a painful dream.

"My poor Claes! yes, and you will cause me more, in spite of yourself,"
she said, passing her hand over his hair. "Sit here beside me," she
continued, pointing to the sofa. "Ah! I can forget it all now, now that
you come back to us; all can be repaired--but you will not abandon
me again? say that you will not! My noble husband, grant me a woman's
influence on your heart, that influence which is so needful to the
happiness of suffering artists, to the troubled minds of great men. You
may be harsh to me, angry with me if you will, but let me check you a
little for your good. I will never abuse the power if you will grant it.
Be famous, but be happy too. Do not love Chemistry better than you love
us. Hear me, we will be generous; we will let Science share your heart;
but oh! my Claes, be just; let us have our half. Tell me, is not my
disinterestedness sublime?"

She made him smile. With the marvellous art such women possess, she
carried the momentous question into the regions of pleasantry where
women reign. But though she seemed to laugh, her heart was violently
contracted and could not easily recover the quiet even action that was
habitual to it. And yet, as she saw in the eyes of Balthazar the rebirth
of a love which was once her glory, the full return of a power she
thought she had lost, she said to him with a smile:--

"Believe me, Balthazar, nature made us to feel; and though you may wish
us to be mere electrical machines, yet your gases and your ethereal
disengaged matters will never explain the gift we possess of looking
into futurity."

"Yes," he exclaimed, "by affinity. The power of vision which makes the
poet, the power of deduction which makes the man of science, are based
on invisible affinities, intangible, imponderable, which vulgar minds
class as moral phenomena, whereas they are physical effects. The prophet
sees and