It was only after scraping for a whole year
that she could escape to Paris or Homburg, where she was at home.
There her sojourn was determined by her good or ill fortune at faro.
What she meditated over her knitting by the firelight--she had put out
her candles--it would be hard to say, perhaps unwholesome to think:
there are souls to look into which is, to our dim eyes, like gazing
down from the verge of one of the Swedenborgian pits.
But much of the evil done by human beings is as the evil of evil
beasts: they know not what they do--an excuse which, except in regard
to the past, no man can make for himself, seeing the very making of it
must testify its falsehood.
She looked up, gave a cry and started to her feet: Stephen stood
before her, halfway between her and the door. Revealed in a flicker
of flame from the fire, he vanished in the following shade, and for
a moment she stood in doubt of her seeing sense. But when the coal
flashed again there was her son, regarding her out of great eyes that
looked as if they had seen death. A ghastly air hung about him, as if
he had just come back from Hades, but in his silent bearing there was
a sanity, even dignity, which strangely impressed her. He came forward
a pace or two, stopped, and said, "Dinna be frichtit, mem. I'm come.
Sen' the lassie hame an' du wi' me as ye like. I canna haud aff o' me.
But I think I'm deein', an' ye needna misguide me.
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