I ask your pardon.

Let us leave it as it was that day in the boudoir, as it is NOW.

Let me still remind you of your mother,--I know she must have been a good woman to have had so good a son,--and when you have found some sweet young girl to make you happy, come to me for a mother's blessing, and we will laugh at the recollection and misunderstanding of this evening." Her voice did not, however, exhibit that exquisite maternal tenderness which the beatific vision ought to have called up, and the persistent voice of Clarence could not be evaded in the shadow.
"I said you reminded me of my mother," he went on at her side, "because I knew her and lost her only as a child.

She never was anything to me but a memory, and yet an ideal of all that was sweet and lovable in woman.

Perhaps it was a dream of what she might have been when she was as young in years as you.