At a cost which no human being could estimate, he had done his duty, and in some degree reaped his reward.  Elsie grew up with a kind of filial feeling for him, such as her nature was capable of.  She never would obey him; that was not to be looked for.  Commands, threats, punishments, were out of the question with her; the mere physical effects of crossing her will betrayed themselves in such changes of expression and color that it would have been senseless to attempt to govern her in any such way.  Leaving her mainly to herself, she could be to some extent indirectly influenced,—­not otherwise.  She called her father “Dudley,” as if he had been her brother.  She ordered everybody and would be ordered by none.

Who could know all these things, except the few people of the household?  What wonder, therefore, that ignorant and shallow persons laid the blame on her father of those peculiarities which were freely talked about,—­of those darker tendencies which were hinted of in whispers?  To all this talk, so far as it reached him, he was supremely indifferent, not only with the indifference which all gentlemen feel to the gossip of their inferiors, but with a charitable calmness which did not wonder or blame.  He knew that his position was not simply a difficult, but an impossible one, and schooled himself to bear his destiny as well as he might and report himself only at Headquarters.

He had grown gentle under this discipline.  His hair was just beginning to be touched with silver, and his expression was that of habitual sadness and anxiety.  He had no counsellor, as we have seen, to turn to, who did not know either too much or too little.  He had no heart to rest upon and into which he might unburden himself of the secrets and the sorrows that were aching in his own breast.  Yet he had not allowed himself to run to waste in the long time since he was left alone to his trials and fears.  He had resisted the seductions which always beset solitary men with restless brains overwrought by depressing agencies.  He disguised no misery to himself with the lying delusion of wine.  He sought no sleep from narcotics, though he lay with throbbing, wide-open eyeballs through all the weary hours of the night.

It was understood between Dudley Venner and old Doctor Kittredge that Elsie was a subject of occasional medical observation, on account of certain mental peculiarities which might end in a permanent affection of her reason.  Beyond this nothing was said, whatever may have been in the mind of either.  But Dudley Venner had studied Elsie’s case in the light of all the books he could find which might do anything towards explaining it.  As in all cases where men meddle with medical science for a special purpose, having no previous acquaintance with it, his imagination found what it wanted in the books he read, and adjusted it to the facts before him.  So it was he came to cherish those two fancies before alluded to:  that the ominous birthmark she had carried from infancy