Strange as it may seem, her father heard all this not without deep sorrow, and such marks of it as his thoughtful and tranquil nature, long schooled by suffering, claimed or permitted, but with a resignation itself the measure of his past trials.  Dear as his daughter might become to him, all he dared to ask of Heaven was that she might be restored to that truer self which lay beneath her false and adventitious being.  If he could once see that the icy lustre in her eyes had become a soft, calm light,—­that her soul was at peace with all about her and with Him above,—­this crumb from the children’s table was enough for him, as it was for the Syro-Phoenician woman who asked that the dark spirit might go out from her daughter.

There was little change the next day, until all at once she said in a clear voice that she should like to see her master at the school, Mr. Langdon.  He came accordingly, and took the place of Helen at her bedside.  It seemed as if Elsie had forgotten the last scene with him.  Might it be that pride had come in, and she had sent for him only to show how superior she had grown to the weakness which had betrayed her into that extraordinary request, so contrary to the instincts and usages of her sex?  Or was it that the singular change which had come over her had involved her passionate fancy for him and swept it away with her other habits of thought and feeling?  Or perhaps, rather, that she felt that all earthly interests were becoming of little account to her, and wished to place herself right with one to whom she had displayed a wayward movement of her unbalanced imagination?  She welcomed Mr. Bernard as quietly as she had received Helen Darley.  He colored at the recollection of that last scene, when he came into her presence; but she smiled with perfect tranquillity.  She did not speak to him of any apprehension; but he saw that she looked upon herself as doomed.  So friendly, yet so calm did she seem through all their interview, that Mr. Bernard could only look back upon her manifestation of feeling towards him on their walk from the school as a vagary of a mind laboring under some unnatural excitement, and wholly at variance with the true character of Elsie Venner, as he saw her before him in her subdued, yet singular beauty.  He looked with almost scientific closeness of observation into the diamond eyes; but that peculiar light which he knew so well was not there.  She was the same in one sense as on that first day when he had seen her coiling and uncoiling her golden chain, yet how different in every aspect which revealed her state of mind and emotion!  Something of tenderness there was, perhaps, in her tone towards him; she would not have sent for him, had she not felt more than an ordinary interest in him.  But through the whole of his visit she never lost her gracious self-possession.  The Dudley race might well be proud of the last of its daughters, as she lay dying, but unconquered by the feeling of the present or the fear of the future.