of having been the intentional cause of the probably accidental sudden illness of the governess.  From this time forward her father was never easy.  Should he keep her apart, or shut her up, for fear of risk to others, and so lose every chance of restoring her mind to its healthy tone by kindly influences and intercourse with wholesome natures?  There was no proof, only presumption, as to the agency of Elsie in the matter referred to.  But the doubt was worse, perhaps, than certainty would have been,—­for then he would have known what to do.

He took the old Doctor as his adviser.  The shrewd old man listened to the father’s story, his explanations of possibilities, of probabilities, of dangers, of hopes.  When he had got through, the Doctor looked him in the face steadily, as if he were saying, Is that all?

The father’s eyes fell.  That was not all.  There was something at the bottom of his soul which he could not bear to speak of,—­nay, which, as often as it reared itself through the dark waves of unworded consciousness into the breathing air of thought, he trod down as the ruined angels tread down a lost soul trying to come up out of the seething sea of torture.  Only this one daughter!  No!  God never would have ordained such a thing.  There was nothing ever heard of like it; it could not be; she was ill,—­she would outgrow all these singularities; he had had an aunt who was peculiar; he had heard that hysteric girls showed the strangest forms of moral obliquity for a time, but came right at last.  She would change all at once, when her health got more firmly settled in the course of her growth.  Are there not rough buds that open into sweet flowers?  Are there not fruits, which, while unripe, are not to be tasted or endured, that mature into the richest taste and fragrance?  In God’s good time she would come to her true nature; her eyes would lose that frightful, cold glitter; her lips would not feel so cold when she pressed them mechanically against his cheek; and that faint birth-mark, her mother swooned when she first saw, would fade wholly out,—­it was less marked, surely, now than it used to be!

So Dudley Venner felt, and would have thought, if he had let his thoughts breathe the air of his soul.  But the Doctor read through words and thoughts and all into the father’s consciousness.  There are states of mind that may be shared by two persons in presence of each other, which remain not only unworded, but unthoughted, if such a word may be coined for our special need.  Such a mutually interpenetrative consciousness there was between the father and the old physician.  By a common impulse, both of them rose in a mechanical way and went to the western window, where each started, as he saw the other’s look directed towards the white stone that stood in the midst of the small plot of green turf.