Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/69

Rh him; he was a man of integrity, and it was he who had settled upon her, in her early widowhood, that annuity which saved her from poverty. But she was conscious that, however superior was her own line to his, yet he looked upon her misshapen frame as one of the worst blurs to which his family pride could stoop. She had a little pitiful vanity; she lingered before her glass and brushed the wave of brown hair more smoothly down the slope of her forehead, and turned to adjust the cape again over the shoulders that would protrude their deformity, ere she went down.

The brother greeted her with kindness, informed her that he was about returning to India, and proposed to take Sebastian with him as his son, educating him for the position he should give him, and insuring his advancement for life. A shiver ran over Elisabetta from top to toe; her heart sunk within her after one great shock; she knew as well in that instant that she should let the boy go as she did when the last tip of the mast sparkled between horizon and blue sky above him.

But she made some feeble show of resistance. "Ah!" she pleaded, clasping her knees and gazing up at the robber, "do not take him from me! He is all I have!"

"I do not propose to take him from you," replied the other. "He shall write to you and receive your letters as often as he chooses. He will return to you, I trust, an honorable and wealthy man of whom you can be proud."

"But will he be proud of me ?" cried Elisabetta, touching the key-note of her after-life. "If he stays with me he will never know—it will come upon him gently—that his mother has been less favored by heaven than other women, he will love her so. But when he returns, after many years and the lapses of forgetfulness, and finds her old, perhaps hideous—for this fair face of mine I cannot hope to keep—it is a fair face, sir!" sobbed Elisabetta.

"It is indeed."

"Well—then? No, he cannot be proud of me, God knows! He will not even be fond of me. Oh, no, no, no, I cannot give it up! His love is too sweet, too dear. Do not ask me—I have so little left."

"You will pardon me," said the brother then, more gently, "if I urge that your selfish desire for his affection is depriving the boy of advantages, the loss of which he may one day feel as bitterly as you would now feel the loss of his affection; and which loss, when he has arrived at manhood, may, in turn, occasion you that of the very affection which now you prize so highly."

Elisabetta, bewildered by this grand speech, waited a minute to unravel it—only getting the word "loss" for a clue—and before she spoke again, Sebastian entered, a splendid child, a sunbeam coming in behind him and making a glory of his hair, a shock of