"Look at me!" she commanded.
Antonio looked at her. His eyes were veiled in tears.
Then it was true.
Regina had never seen her husband weep, nor had she ever imagined he could weep.
At that moment, when everything darkened within her, not in swift passing eclipse, but in unending twilight, a confused recollection came to her of something far off—so far off that for years and years it had not returned to her mind. She saw again a man seated before a burning hearth. This man crouched, his elbows on his knees, his face on his hands, and he wept; while a woman bent over him, her hand laid on his bald head.
The man was her father, the spendthrift; the woman her patient mother.
Was it a dream? or a reality of her unconscious infancy, far away, forgotten? She did not know; but at that moment in the shadow of her soul a light appeared, rose-red like the reflection of the burning hearth in that distant picture of human error and of human pity.
She did not think of laying her hand on her husband's head as her mother had laid hers on the head of that father who, perhaps, had been more guilty than Antonio; but she remembered the serene and beautiful life of that woman who had fulfilled her cycle as all good women must fulfil theirs, mid the love of her children and for their sake. Never had the widow made those sad memories to weigh upon her children. If they suffered, as by law of nature all born of woman must suffer, the memory of her did not add to their grief, but softened it.
"And I, too," thought Regina, "must fulfil my cycle. Our child must never know that we have suffered and have erred."