The old woman told the whole story of Elsie, of her birth, of her peculiarities of person and disposition, of the passionate fears and hopes with which her father had watched the course of her development.  She recounted all her strange ways, from the hour when she first tried to crawl across the carpet, and her father shrank from her with an involuntary shudder as she worked her way towards him.  With the memory of Juliet’s nurse she told the story of her teething, and how, the woman to whose breast she had clung dying suddenly about that time, they had to struggle hard with the child before she would learn the accomplishment of feeding with a spoon.  And so of her fierce plays and fiercer disputes with that boy who had been her companion, and the whole scene of the quarrel when she struck him with those sharp white teeth, frightening her, old Sophy, almost to death; for, as she said, the boy would have died, if it hadn’t been for the old Doctor’s galloping over as fast as he could gallop and burning the places right out of his arm.  Then came the story of that other incident, sufficiently alluded to already, which had produced such an ecstasy of fright and left such a nightmare of apprehension in the household.  And so the old woman came down to this present time.  That boy she never loved nor trusted was grown to a dark, dangerous-looking man, and he was under their roof.  He wanted to marry our poor Elsie, and Elsie hated him, and sometimes she would look at him over her shoulder just as she used to look at that woman she hated; and she, old Sophy, couldn’t sleep for thinking she should hear a scream from the white chamber some night and find him in spasms such as that woman came so near dying with.  And then there was something about Elsie she did not know what to make of:  she would sit and hang her head sometimes, and look as if she were dreaming; and she brought home books they said a young gentleman up at the great school lent her; and once she heard her whisper in her sleep, and she talked as young girls do to themselves when they’re thinking about somebody they have a liking for and think nobody knows it.

She finished her long story at last.  The minister had listened to it in perfect silence.  He sat still even when she had done speaking,—­still, and lost in thought.  It was a very awkward matter for him to have a hand in.  Old Sophy was his parishioner, but the Venners had a pew in the Reverend Mr. Fairweather’s meeting-house.  It would seem that he, Mr. Fairweather, was the natural adviser of the parties most interested.  Had he sense and spirit enough to deal with such people?  Was there enough capital of humanity in his somewhat limited nature to furnish sympathy and unshrinking service for his friends in an emergency? or was he too busy with his own attacks of spiritual neuralgia, and too much occupied with taking account of stock of his own thin-blooded offences, to forget himself and his personal interests on the small scale and the large, and run a risk of his life, if need were, at any rate give himself up without reserve to the dangerous task of guiding and counselling these distressed and imperilled fellow-creatures?