his eyes, and he would put his arms out to take her from the old woman,—­but all at once her eyes would narrow and she would throw her head back; and a shudder would seize him as he stooped over his child,—­he could not look upon her,—­he could not touch his lips to her cheek; nay, there would sometimes come into his soul such frightful suggestions that he would hurry from the room lest the hinted thought should become a momentary madness and he should lift his hand against the helpless infant which owed him life.

In those miserable days he used to wander all over The Mountain in his restless endeavor to seek some relief for inward suffering in outward action.  He had no thought of throwing himself from the summit of any of the broken cliffs, but he clambered over them recklessly, as having no particular care for his life.  Sometimes he would go into the accursed district where the venomous reptiles were always to be dreaded, and court their worst haunts, and kill all he could come near with a kind of blind fury that was strange in a person of his gentle nature.

One overhanging cliff was a favorite haunt of his.  It frowned upon his home beneath in a very menacing way; he noticed slight seams and fissures that looked ominous;—­what would happen, if it broke off some time or other and came crashing down on the fields and roofs below?  He thought of such a possible catastrophe with a singular indifference, in fact with a feeling almost like pleasure.  It would be such a swift and thorough solution of this great problem of life he was working out in ever-recurring daily anguish!  The remote possibility of such a catastrophe had frightened some timid dwellers beneath The Mountain to other places of residence; here the danger was most imminent, and yet he loved to dwell upon the chances of its occurrence.  Danger is often the best counter-irritant in cases of mental suffering; he found a solace in careless exposure of his life, and learned to endure the trials of each day better by dwelling in imagination on the possibility that it might be the last for him and the home that was his.

Time, the great consoler, helped these influences, and he gradually fell into more easy and less dangerous habits of life.  He ceased from his more perilous rambles.  He thought less of the danger from the great overhanging rocks and forests; they had hung there for centuries; it was not very likely they would crash or slide in his time.  He became accustomed to all Elsie’s strange looks and ways.  Old Sophy dressed her with ruffles round her neck, and hunted up the red coral branch with silver bells which the little toothless Dudleys had bitten upon for a hundred years.  By an infinite effort, her father forced himself to become the companion of this child, for whom he had such a mingled feeling, but whose presence was always a trial to him and often a terror.