His sad, pock-marked face had a torturing fascination for her. It was almost pure pain, yet she could not turn her eyes from it. She reproached herself that it gave her pain, yet was almost indignant with the face she saw for usurping the place of her boy’s beauty. At the same time very pity made her love with a new and deeper tenderness the poor spoilt visage, pathetic in its ugliness.

Not a word did she utter of reproach. His father was doing enough for both in that way! Every few minutes she would gaze intently in his face for a moment, and then clasp him to her heart as if seeking a shorter way to his presence than through the ruined door of his countenance.

Hester, who had never received from her half so much show of tenderness, could not help, like the elder brother in the divine tale, a little choking at the sight, but she soon consoled herself that the less poor Corney deserved it the more he needed it. The worst of it to Hester was that she could not with any confidence look on the prodigal as a repentant one. And if he was not, all this tenderness, she feared and with reason, would but blind him to his moral condition. But she thought also that God would do what he could to keep the love of such a mother from hurting, and it was not long before she was encouraged by a softness in Corney’s look, and a humid expression in his eyes which she had never seen before.

Doubtless had he been as in former days, he would have turned from such over flow of love as womanish gush. But disgraced, worn out, and even to his own eyes an unpleasant object, he was not so much inclined to repel the love of the only one knowing his story who did not feel for him more or less contempt. Sometimes in those terrible half-dreams in the dark of early morning when suddenly waked by conscience to hold a tete-a-tete with her, he would imagine himself walking into the bank, and encountering the eyes of all the men on his way to his uncle, whom next to his father he feared—then find himself running for refuge to the bosom of his mother. She was true to him yet!

Slowly, slowly, something was working on him—now in the imagined judgment of others, now in the thought of his wife, now in the devotion of his mother. Little result was there for earthly eye, but the mother’s perceived or imagined a difference in him. If only she could perceive something plain to tell her husband! If the ice that froze up the spring of his love would but begin to melt!

For to whom are we to go for refuge from ourselves if not to those through whom we were born into the world, and who are to blame for more or less of our unfitness for a true life?—“His father must forgive him!” she said to herself. She would go down on her knees to him. Their boy should not be left out in the cold! If he had been guilty, what was that to the cruel world so ready to punish, so ready to do worse! The mother still carried in her soul the child born of her body, preparing for him the new and better, the all-lovely birth of repentance unto life.