He held this confidence and vision steadily before him, but nothing availed against the melancholy of his natural state.  He was conscious of his dull and solitary condition, and he saw, too, that it enveloped me.  I think his heart was, at this time, drawn out towards me in an immense tenderness.  Sometimes, when the early twilight descended upon us in the study, and he could no longer peer with advantage into the depths of his microscope, he would beckon me to him silently, and fold me closely in his arms.  I used to turn my face up to his, patiently and wonderingly, while the large, unwilling tears gathered in the corners of his eyelids.  My training had given me a preternatural faculty of stillness, and we would stay so, without a word or a movement, until the darkness filled the room.  And then, with my little hand in his, we would walk sedately downstairs to the parlour, where we would find that the lamp was lighted, and that our melancholy vigil was ended.  I do not think that at any part of our lives my Father and I were drawn so close to one another as we were in that summer of 1857.  Yet we seldom spoke of what lay so warm and fragrant between us, the flower-like thought of our Departed.

The visit to my cousins had made one considerable change in me.  Under the old solitary discipline, my intelligence had grown at the expense of my sentiment.  I was innocent, but inhuman.  The long suffering and the death of my Mother had awakened my heart, had taught me what pain was, but had left me savage and morose.  I had still no idea of the relations of human beings to one another; I had learned no word of that philosophy which comes to the children of the poor in the struggle of the street and to the children of the well-to-do in the clash of the nursery.  In other words, I had no humanity; I had been carefully shielded from the chance of ‘catching’ it, as though it were the most dangerous of microbes.  But now that I had enjoyed a little of the common experience of childhood, a great change had come upon me.  Before I went to Clifton, my mental life was all interior, a rack of baseless dream upon dream.  But, now, I was eager to look out of the window, to go out in the streets; I was taken with a curiosity about human life.  Even from my vantage of the window-pane, I watched boys and girls go by with an interest which began to be almost wistful.

Still I continued to have no young companions.  But on summer evenings I used to drag my Father out, taking the initiative myself, stamping in playful impatience at his irresolution, fetching his hat and stick, and waiting.  We used to sally forth at last together, hand in hand, descending the Caledonian Road, with all its shops, as far as Mother Shipton, or else winding among the semi-genteel squares and terraces westward by Copenhagen Street, or, best of all, mounting to the Regent’s Canal, where we paused to lean over the bridge and watch flotillas of ducks steer under us, or little white dogs dash,