“Take it away!—­take it away!—­quick!” said Old Sophy, as she hastened to her mistress’s pillow.  “It’s the leaves of the tree that was always death to her,—­take it away!  She can’t live wi’ it in the room!”

The poor old woman began chafing Elsie’s hands, and Helen to try to rouse her with hartshorn, while a third frightened attendant gathered up the flowers and the basket and carried them out of the apartment.  She came to herself after a time, but exhausted and then wandering.  In her delirium, she talked constantly as if she were in a cave, with such exactness of circumstance that Helen could not doubt at all that she had some such retreat among the rocks of The Mountain, probably fitted up in her own fantastic way, where she sometimes hid herself from all human eyes, and of the entrance to which she alone possessed the secret.

All this passed away, and left her, of course, weaker than before.  But this was not the only influence the unexplained paroxysm had left behind it.  From this time forward there was a change in her whole expression and her manner.  The shadows ceased flitting over her features, and the old woman, who watched her from day to day and from hour to hour as a mother watches her child, saw the likeness she bore to her mother coming forth more and more, as the cold glitter died out of the diamond eyes, and the scowl disappeared from the dark brows and low forehead.

With all the kindness and indulgence her father had bestowed upon her, Elsie had never felt that he loved her.  The reader knows well enough what fatal recollections and associations had frozen up the springs of natural affection in his breast.  There was nothing in the world he would not do for Elsie.  He had sacrificed his whole life to her.  His very seeming carelessness about restraining her was all calculated; he knew that restraint would produce nothing but utter alienation.  Just so far as she allowed him, he shared her studies, her few pleasures, her thoughts; but she was essentially solitary and uncommunicative.  No person, as was said long ago, could judge him,—­because his task was not merely difficult, but simply impracticable to human powers.  A nature like Elsie’s had necessarily to be studied by itself, and to be followed in its laws where it could not be led.

Every day, at different hours, during the whole of his daughter’s illness, Dudley Venner had sat by her, doing all he could to soothe and please her:  always the same thin film of some emotional non-conductor between them; always that kind of habitual regard and family-interest, mingled with the deepest pity on one side and a sort of respect on the other, which never warmed into outward evidences of affection.

It was after this occasion, when she had been so profoundly agitated by a seemingly insignificant cause, that her father and Old Sophy were sitting, one at one side of her bed and one at the other.  She had fallen into a light slumber.  As they were looking at her, the same thought came into both their minds at the same moment.  Old Sophy spoke for both, as she said, in a low voice,—­