Patrick's love for her mother had partaken of the enduring qualities of the great passions of history.

Paolo and Francesca, Abelard and Heloise--even they could have known no deeper, no more lasting love than that of Patrick Lovell for Pauline.
The love-letters of the dead woman lay on Sara's lap, still tied together with the black ribbon which Patrick's fingers must have knotted round them.

There were only six of them--half-a-dozen memories of a love that had come hopelessly to grief--tangible memories which her lover had never had the heart to destroy.
Sara handled them caressingly, these few, pathetic records of a bygone passion, and at length, with hands that shook a little, she removed the ribbon that bound them together.

Where it had lain, preserving the strip of paper beneath it from contact with the dust, bands of white traversed the faint discoloration which time had worked upon the outermost envelopes--mutely witnessing to the long years that had passed away since the letters had been penned in the first rapturous glow of hot young love.
Slowly, with a rather wistful sense of regret that it must needs be done, Sara dropped them one by one, unread, into the fire, and watched them flare up with a sudden spurt of flame, then curl and shrivel into dead, grey ash--those last links with the romance of his youth which Patrick had treasured so long and faithfully.
She wondered what manner of woman her mother could have been to inspire so great a love that even her own unfaith had failed to sour it.
Her childish recollection, blurred by the passage of years, was of a white-faced, rather haggard-looking woman with deep-set, haunted eyes and a bitter mouth, but whose rare smile, when it came, was so enchanting that it wiped out, for the moment, all remembrance of the harsh lines which hardened her face when in repose.
With eager hands the girl picked up the little velvet case that held the miniature, and snapped open the lid.

The painting within, rimmed in old paste, was of a girl in her early twenties.