Verdayne found it growing harder and harder for him to speak.

"I do not think that strange, Boy. Others would not understand it, but I
do. She was so intensely a mother that the spirit of the great Holy
Mother must have been at all times hovering closely about her! Her
deepest desires centred about her son. You were the embodiment of the
greatest, sweetest joys--if not the only real joys--of her strangely
unhappy life, and her whole thought, her one hope, was for you. In your
soul must live all the unrealized hopes and crucified ideals of the
woman who, always every inch a queen, was never more truly regal than in
the supreme hour that crowned her your mother."

"And am I like her, Uncle Paul? Am I really like her?"

"So much so, Boy, that she sometimes seems to live again in you. Like
her, you believe so thoroughly in the goodness and greatness of a
God--in the beauty and glory of the world fraught with lessons of life
and death--in the omnipotence of Fate--in the truth and power and
grandeur of overmastering love. You believe in the past, in all the
dreams and legends of the Long Ago still relived in the Now, in the
capabilities of the human mind, the kingship of the soul. Your voice is
hers, every tone and cadence is as her own voice repeating her own
words. Be glad, Paul, that you are like your mother, and hope that with
the power to think her thoughts and dream lier dreams, you may also have
the power to love as she loved, and, if need be, die her death!"

"But you think the same thoughts, Uncle Paul. You believe all I
believe!"