On the toilet-table, in a white silk handkerchief, was his hair,
smoothed and combed.

She lay there in her lace-trimmed nightgown, great tears rolling
down her cheeks. He had come, intending to throw himself into her
arms and beg her pardon a thousand times. But he had a strong
feeling that he had better not do so, or was he afraid to? She was
in the clouds, far, far away. She seemed in a trance: something,
at once painful and sacred, held her enchained. She was both
pathetic and sublime,

The boy stepped quietly from the room and hurried off to school.

She remained in bed that day and the next, and made him sit with
the servant in order that she might be alone. When she was in
trouble she always behaved thus, and that he should cross her in
this way was the greatest trial that she had ever known. It came
upon her, too, like a deluge of rain from a clear sky. NOW it
seemed to her that she could foresee his future--and her own.

She laid the blame of all this on his paternal ancestry. She could
not see that incessant artistic fuss and too much intellectual
training had, perhaps, aroused in him a desire for independence.

The first time that she saw him again with his cropped head, which
grew more and more like his father's in shape, her tears flowed
quietly.

When he wished to come to her side, she waived him back with her
shapely hand, nor would she talk to him; when he talked she hardly