When he told of Dick’s attempt on the young schoolmaster, ("You know Mr. Langdon very well, Elsie,—­a perfectly inoffensive young man, as I understand,”) Elsie turned her face away and slid along by the wall to the window which looked out on the little grass-plot with the white stone standing in it.  Her father could not see her face, but he knew by her movements that her dangerous mood was on her.  When she heard the sequel of the story, the discomfiture and capture of Dick, she turned round for an instant, with a look of contempt and of something like triumph upon her face.  Her father saw that her cousin had become odious to her.  He knew well, by every change of her countenance, by her movements, by every varying curve of her graceful figure, the transitions from passion to repose, from fierce excitement to the dull languor which often succeeded her threatening paroxysms.

She remained looking out at the window.  A group of white fan-tailed pigeons had lighted on the green plot before it and clustered about one of their companions who lay on his back, fluttering in a strange way, with outspread wings and twitching feet.  Elsie uttered a faint cry; these were her special favorites, and often fed from her hand.  She threw open the long window, sprang out, caught up the white fan-tail, and held it to her bosom.  The bird stretched himself out, and then lay still, with open eyes, lifeless.  She looked at him a moment, and, sliding in through the open window and through the study, sought her own apartment, where she locked herself in, and began to sob and moan like those that weep.  But the gracious solace of tears seemed to be denied her, and her grief, like her anger, was a dull ache, longing, like that, to finish itself with a fierce paroxysm, but wanting its natural outlet.

This seemingly trifling incident of the death of her favorite appeared to change all the current of her thought.  Whether it were the sight of the dying bird, or the thought that her own agency might have been concerned in it, or some deeper grief, which took this occasion to declare itself,—­some dark remorse or hopeless longing,—­whatever it might be, there was an unwonted tumult in her soul.  To whom should she go in her vague misery?  Only to Him who knows all His creatures’ sorrows, and listens to the faintest human cry.  She knelt, as she had been taught to kneel from her childhood, and tried to pray.  But her thoughts refused to flow in the language of supplication.  She could not plead for herself as other women plead in their hours of anguish.  She rose like one who should stoop to drink, and find dust in the place of water.  Partly from restlessness, partly from an attraction she hardly avowed to herself, she followed her usual habit and strolled listlessly along to the school.

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