“Oh, my daughter! She will come—I know she will come to forgive me before I die. I want all my senses. I want to tell her what I have suffered through my false pride. Her father is dead—died praying that he might only see and bless his child. And must I die, too, without seeing her? Oh, no. God is too merciful. Pray—oh, pray, minister of God, that she be sent to me before I die.”
And her white, thin lips moved all the time he knelt in prayer.
And before he arose to his feet, while the others, kneeling, listened and wept, a wild, glad cry broke from that mother’s lips.
“She is coming! My Georgiana is coming! I heard a carriage stop at the door. It is she—thank Heaven, it is my daughter!”
How a mother’s ear, even when that mother was on her death-bed, could hear what no one else had heard, how she could feel so certain her child was near, is beyond our ken. But it was so.
A minute, scarcely that, had elapsed when the door softly opened, and mother and child wept in each other’s arms.
It was a holy scene. No word of recrimination, no breath of the past, only this:
“Mother, dear mother!”
“My child! God bless my only child—my love!”
There was not a dry eye in the room—those who had wept with grief before over a dying friend, now wept with joy to think her eyes had not closed before that meeting—that reconciliation took place.