The 'large, cruel, black eyes,' as Lucy Forrester had called them long ago, were dim now, and were turned with pitiful pleading upon the wife he had so grievously injured.
The priest stood by, and signed to Mary to kneel and put her face near her husband, that she might hear what he had to say.
As she obeyed, the hood fell back from her head, and a ray of sunshine caught the wealth of her rich chestnut hair and made an aureole round it. The grey streaks, which sorrow rather than years, had mingled amongst the bronze locks, shone like silver. She took the long, wasted hand in hers, and, in a low, clear voice, said,—
'I am here, Ambrose! what would you say to me?'
'The boy!' he gasped; 'fetch hither the boy!'
One of the Brothers obeyed the dying man's request, and from a pallet at the farther end of the room he brought the boy, whose cheeks were aflame with fever, as he lay helpless in the Brother's arms.
'Here, Ambrose,' the dying father said—'this—this is your mother; be a good son to her.'
Often as Mary Gifford had drawn a picture in her own mind of this possible meeting with her son, so long delayed, such a meeting as this had never been imagined in her wildest dreams.
'Thus, then, I make atonement,' the unhappy man said. 'Take him, Mary, and forgive it all.'
'Yes,' Mary said, as the boy was laid on the pallet at his father's feet, and his mother clasped him close to her side. 'Yes, I forgive—'