It was a heart-breaking story of love and sacrifice, of a mother tortured to save her child from the fate that had befallen his father.
"The Sultan will make my boy like himself," the letter went on. "For there is no one at hand to stop him. Daily my influence grows less, and his stronger. The boy admires and copies the man he deems his father. He is too young to know the Sultan for what he really is. He sees only a man, bold and picturesque. And the Sultan spoils him utterly, he encourages him to be cruel and arrogant, he fosters all that is bad in the boy. It is useless for me to try and check him, for my own son laughs at me now."
The writing grew more feeble as the letter went on; the wild entreaty of a mother who had no life outside of her son, and who saw him being ruined by his own father's murderer.
"Whoever finds this be kind to my boy, my Raoul, for the sake of a woman who has suffered much, for the sake of his martyred father, Colonel Raoul Le Breton. Do not judge my son by what he is, but by what he might have been. In the Sultan Casim he has a bad example, a savage teacher, a wild, profligate, cruel man, who would make the boy as barbarous as he is himself."
The writing grew even more feeble, a faint scrawl on the yellow paper.
"I am dying, and my son is far away. I shall not live until my boy returns. And he will be left with no influence but the Sultan's. O Fate, deal kindly with my boy, my Raoul, left alone with savages in this barbaric city. I have only endured these dreadful years for the sake of my son. In the name of pity be kind to him. He will have no chance in the hands of his present teacher. Have mercy for the sake of his tortured mother, and his father, that brave soldier who gave his life for France.
ANNETTE LE BRETON."
Pansy read the sheets through without once raising her eyes. She was ravenous for the contents.
At that moment it seemed as if the dim, gilded room were full of tears and sorrows; the faint, sweet fragrance of the girl who had lived there long years ago, suffering and enduring for the sake of her boy.
It was not in Pansy's kind heart to refuse that tragic mother pleading for her son.