The father of Elsie Venner knew his duties and his difficulties too well to trouble himself about anything others might think or say.  So soon as he found that he could not govern his child, he gave his life up to following her and protecting her as far as he could.  It was a stern and terrible trial for a man of acute sensibility, and not without force of intellect and will, and the manly ambition for himself and his family-name which belonged to his endowments and his position.  Passive endurance is the hardest trial to persons of such a nature.

What made it still more a long martyrdom was the necessity for bearing his cross in utter loneliness.  He could not tell his griefs.  He could not talk of them even with those who knew their secret spring.  His minister had the unsympathetic nature which is common in the meaner sort of devotees,—­persons who mistake spiritual selfishness for sanctity, and grab at the infinite prize of the great Future and Elsewhere with the egotism they excommunicate in its hardly more odious forms of avarice and self-indulgence.  How could he speak with the old physician and the old black woman about a sorrow and a terror which but to name was to strike dumb the lips of Consolation?

In the dawn of his manhood he had found that second consciousness for which young men and young women go about looking into each other’s faces, with their sweet, artless aim playing in every feature, and making them beautiful to each other, as to all of us.  He had found his other self early, before he had grown weary in the search and wasted his freshness in vain longings:  the lot of many, perhaps we may say of most, who infringe the patent of our social order by intruding themselves into a life already upon half-allowance of the necessary luxuries of existence.  The life he had led for a brief space was not only beautiful in outward circumstance, as old Sophy had described it to the Reverend Doctor.  It was that delicious process of the tuning of two souls to each other, string by string, not without little half-pleasing discords now and then when some chord in one or the other proves to be over-strained or over-lax, but always approaching nearer and nearer to harmony, until they become at last as two instruments with a single voice.  Something more than a year of this blissful doubled consciousness had passed over him when he found himself once more alone,—­alone, save for the little diamond-eyed child lying in the old woman’s arms, with the coral necklace round her throat and the rattle in her hand.

He would not die by his own act.  It was not the way in his family.  There may have been other, perhaps better reasons, but this was enough; he did not come of suicidal stock.  He must live for this child’s sake, at any rate; and yet,—­oh, yet, who could tell with what thoughts he looked upon her?  Sometimes her little features would look placid, and something like a smile would steal over them; then all his tender feelings would rush up into