About two hours afterwards, he opened the letter, and learnt that his niece, Bernardine, had arrived safely in Petershof, and that she intended to get better and come home strong.  He tore up the letter, and instinctively turned to the photograph on the mantelpiece.  It was the picture of a face young and yet old, sad and yet with possibilities of merriment, thin and drawn and almost wrinkled, and with piercing eyes which, even in the dull lifelessness of the photograph, seemed to be burning themselves away.  Not a pleasing nor a good face; yet intensely pathetic because of its undisguised harassment.

Zerviah looked at it for a moment.

“She has never been much to either of us,” he said to himself.  “And yet, when Malvina was alive, I used to think that she was hard on Bernardine.  I believe I said so once or twice.  But Malvina had her own way of looking at things.  Well, that is over now.”

He then, with characteristic speed, dismissed all thoughts which did not relate to Roman History; and the remembrance of Malvina, his wife, and Bernardine, his niece, took up an accustomed position in the background of his mind.

Bernardine had suffered a cheerless childhood in which dolls and toys took no leading part.  She had no affection to bestow on any doll, nor any woolly lamb, nor apparently on any human person; unless, perhaps, there was the possibility of a friendly inclination towards Uncle Zerviah, who would not have understood the value of any deeper feeling, and did not therefore call the child cold-hearted and unresponsive, as he might well have done.

This she certainly was, judged by the standard of other children; but then no softening influences had been at work during her tenderest years.  Aunt Malvina knew as much about sympathy as she did about the properties of an ellipse; and even the fairies had failed to win little Bernardine.  At first they tried with loving patience what they might do for her; they came out of their books, and danced and sang to her, and whispered sweet stories to her, at twilight, the fairies’ own time.  But she would have none of them, for all their gentle persuasion.  So they gave up trying to please her, and left her as they had found her, loveless.  What can be said of a childhood which even the fairies have failed to touch with the warm glow of affection?

Such a little restless spirit, striving to express itself now in this direction, now in that; yet always actuated by the same constant force, the desire for work.  Bernardine seemed to have no special wish to be useful to others; she seemed just to have a natural tendency to work, even as others have a natural tendency to play.  She was always in earnest; life for little Bernardine meant something serious.