so beautiful!  She called him ‘Father!’ Tha word had touched his brain, as lightning cuts a tree.  He looked around him with a distracted air, then gazed on the tranced form he held with a glance which would have penetrated her soul, and murmured unconsciously the wild word she had uttered.  She called him ‘Father!’ He dared not think who she might be.  His thoughts were wandering in a distant land; visions of another life, another country, rose before him, troubled and obscure.  Baffled aspirations, and hopes blighted in the bud, and the cherished secrets of his lorn existence, clustered like clouds upon his perplexed, yet creative, brain.  She called him, ‘Father!’ It was a word to make him mad.  ‘Father!’ This beautiful being had called him ‘Father,’ and seemed to have expired, as it were, in the irresistible expression.  His heart yearned to her; he had met her embrace with an inexplicable sympathy; her devotion had seemed, as it were, her duty and his right.  Yet who was she?  He was a father.  It was a fact, a fact alike full of solace and mortification, the consciousness of which never deserted him.  But he was the father of an unknown child; to him the child of his poetic dreams, rather than his reality.  And now there came this radiant creature, and called him ‘Father!’ Was he awake, and in the harsh busy world; or was it the apparition of au over-excited imagination, brooding too constantly on one fond idea, on which he now gazed so fixedly?  Was this some spirit?  Would that she would speak again!  Would that those sealed lips would part and utter but one word, would but again call him ‘Father,’ and he asked no more!

‘Father!’ to be called ‘Father’ by one whom he could not name, by one over whom he mused in solitude, by one to whom he had poured forth all the passion of his desolate soul; to be called ‘Father’ by this being was the aspiring secret of his life.  He had painted her to himself in his loneliness, he had conjured up dreams of ineffable loveliness, and inexpressible love; he had led with her an imaginary life of thrilling tenderness; he had indulged in a delicious fancy of mutual interchange of the most exquisite offices of our nature; and then, when he had sometimes looked around him, and found no daughter there, no beaming countenance of purity to greet him with its constant smile, and receive the quick and ceaseless tribute of his vigilant affection, the tears had stolen down his lately-excited features, all the consoling beauty of his visions had vanished into air, he had felt the deep curse of his desolation, and had anathematised the cunning brain that made his misery a thousand-fold keener by the mockery of its transporting illusions.

And now there came this transcendent creature, with a form more glowing than all his dreams; a voice more musical than a seraphic chorus, though it had uttered but one thrilling word:  there came this transcendent creature, beaming with grace, beauty, and love, and had fallen upon his heart, and called him ‘Father!’