Mr. Dinsmore hid his face, and his whole frame shook with emotion.

“My punishment is greater than I can bear!” he exclaimed in a voice choked with grief.  “Adelaide, do you not despise and hate me for my cruelty to that angel-child?”

“My poor brother, I am very sorry for you,” she replied, laying her hand on his arm, while the tears trembled in her eyes.

There was a light tap at the door.  It was Doctor Barton.  “Mr. Dinsmore,” he said, “she is begging so piteously for her papa that, perhaps, it would be well for you to show yourself again; it is just possible she may recognize you”

Mr. Dinsmore waited for no second bidding, but following the physician with eager haste, was the next moment at the bedside.

The little girl was moving restlessly about, moaning, “Oh! papa, papa, will you never come?”

“I am here, darling,” he replied in tones of the tenderest affection.  “I have come back to my little girl”

She turned her head to look at him.  “No, no,” she said, “I want my papa.”

“My darling, do you not know me?” he asked in a voice quivering with emotion.

“No, no, you shall not!  I will never do it—­never.  Oh! make him go away,” she shrieked, clinging to Mrs. Travilla, and glaring at him with a look of the wildest affright, “he has come to torture me because I won’t pray to the Virgin.”

“It is quite useless,” said the doctor, shaking his head sorrowfully; “she evidently does not know you.”

And the unhappy father turned away and left the room to shut himself up again alone with his agony and remorse.

No one saw him again that night, and when the maid came to attend to his room in the morning, she was surprised and alarmed to find that the bed had not been touched.

Mr. Travilla, who was keeping a sorrowful vigil in the room below, had he been questioned, could have told that there had been scarcely a cessation in the sound of the footsteps pacing to and fro over his head.  It had been a night of anguish and heart-searching, such as Horace Dinsmore had never passed through before.  For the first time he saw himself to be what he really was in the sight of God, a guilty, hell-deserving sinner—­lost, ruined, and undone.  He had never believed it before, and the prayers which he had occasionally offered up had been very much in the spirit of the Pharisee’s, “God, I thank thee that I am not as other men are!”

He had been blessed with a pious mother, who was early taken from him; yet not too early to have had some influence in forming the character of her son; and the faint but tender recollection of that mother’s prayers and teachings had proved a safeguard to him in many an hour of temptation, and had kept him from falling into the open vices of some of his less scrupulous companions.  But he had been very proud of his morality and his upright life, unstained by any dishonorable act.  He had always thought of himself as quite deserving of the prosperity with which he had been blessed in the affairs of this world, and just as likely as any one to be happy in the next.