Felix sought his mother in her library. Felicita was alone, reading in the light of a lamp which shed a strong illumination over her. In his eyes she was incomparably the loveliest woman he had ever seen, not even excepting Alice; and the stately magnificence of her velvet dress, and rich lace, and costly jewels, was utterly different from that of any other woman he knew. For Mrs. Pascal dressed simply, as became the wife of a country rector; and Phebe, in her studio, always wore a blouse or apron of brown holland, which suited her well, making her homely and domestic in appearance as she was in nature. Felicita looked like a queen in his eyes.
When she heard his voice speaking to her, having not caught the sound of his step on the soft carpet, Felicita looked up with a smile in her dark eyes. In a day or two her son was about to leave her roof, and her heart felt very soft toward him. She had scarcely realized that he was a man, until she knew that he had decided to have a place and a dwelling of his own.
She stretched out both hands to him, with a gesture of tenderness peculiar to herself, and shown only to him. It was as if one hand could not link them closely enough; could not bring them so nearly heart to heart. Felix took them both into his own, and knelt down before her; his young face flushed with eagerness, and his eyes, so like her own, fastened upon hers.
"Your face speaks for you," she said, pressing one of her rare kisses upon it. "What is it my boy has to tell me?"
"Oh, mother," he cried, "you will never think I love you less than I have always done? See, I kiss your feet still as I used to do when I was a boy."
He bent his head to caress the little feet, and then laid it on his mother's lap, while she let her white fingers play with his hair.
"Why should you love me less than you have always done?" she asked, in a sweet languid voice. "Have I ever changed toward you, Felix?"
"No, mother, no," he answered, "but to-night I feel how different I am from what I was but a year or two ago. I am a man now; I was a boy then."
"You will always be a boy to me," she said, with a tender smile.
"Yet I am as old as my father was when you were married," he replied.