. I
hope he does. For, if he does, he'll see that I was not to blame for what
I did, that it was Fate behind me. He was a big man, and if I'd worked
with him, we'd have done big things, bigger than he did, and that was big
enough."
"Do nothing till you see me," his mother had written in a postscript to
her letter, and, with a moroseness at his heart and scorn of Barouche at
his lips, he went slowly up to his mother's room. At her door he paused.
But the woman was his mother, and it must be faced. After all, she had
kept faith ever since he was born. He believed that. She had been an
honest wife ever since that fatal summer twenty-seven years before.
"She has suffered," he said, and knocked at her door. An instant later he
was inside the room. There was only a dim light, but his mother was
sitting up in her bed, a gaunt and yet beautiful, sad-eyed figure of a
woman. For a moment Carnac paused. As he stood motionless, the face of
the woman became more drawn and haggard, the eyes more deeply mournful.
Her lips opened as though she would speak, but no sound came, and Carnac
could hardly bear to look at her. Yet he did look, and all at once there
rushed into his heart the love he had ever felt for her.
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