Read "John Halifax, Gentleman" by Dinah Mulock online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Guy and his mother were together. She lay on a sofa in her dressing-room; he sat on a stool beside her, so that her arm could rest on his neck and she could now and then turn his face towards her and look at it -- oh, what a look!
She had had him with her for two whole days -- two days to be set against eight years! Yet the eight years seemed already to have collapsed into a span of time, and the two days to have risen up a great mountain of happiness, making a barrier complete against the woeful past, as happiness can do -- thanks to the All-merciful for His mercies. Most especially for that mercy -- true as His truth to the experience of all pure hearts -- that one bright, brief season of joy can outweigh, in reality and even in remembrance, whole years of apparently interminable pain.