Scheherazade by Florence Warden

George Lauriston was not allowed to make much of his small discovery that Nouna's mother was not so far off as she wished it to be believed. The very morning after his meeting with the strange lady in the housekeeper's room he received a private communication to the effect that Madame di Valdestillas had run over to England from Paris on purpose to see in the flesh the man upon whom her daughter's happiness depended; she had not dared to show herself to Nouna lest her darling should be overwhelmed at the shortness of her visit, and ply her with prayers which it would be impossible to resist and cruel to her invalid husband to grant. She had seen, so she declared, generosity and all noble qualities imprinted in her son-in-law's face, and she begged him to open his heart to receive her as his mother as well as Nouna's, when, at two or three months' time at farthest, she would induce her husband to settle permanently in England, so that she might be near her children.

"You must have seen, my dear Mr. Lauriston," she went on, "that at sight of you I was almost too much overcome to speak. Think what it is to be face to face, for the first time, with the person to whose care you have blindly confided the being you love best in the world, to be for the first time in seven years under the same roof with the creature for whose sake alone the world seems bright to you, and the chill air of this earth worth the breathing. I lead a brilliant life as the wife of a rich man, a man of rank; but it is empty and dreary to me without the child whom for her own sake I may not now see. Be kind to her, cherish her, be to her the tender guardian my other ties prevented me from being, for what I have entrusted to your care is the idol of my prayers.