One overhanging cliff was a favorite haunt of his.  It frowned upon his home beneath in a very menacing way; he noticed slight seams and fissures that looked ominous;—­what would happen, if it broke off some time or other and came crashing down on the fields and roofs below?  He thought of such a possible catastrophe with a singular indifference, in fact with a feeling almost like pleasure.  It would be such a swift and thorough solution of this great problem of life he was working out in ever-recurring daily anguish!  The remote possibility of such a catastrophe had frightened some timid dwellers beneath The Mountain to other places of residence; here the danger was most imminent, and yet he loved to dwell upon the chances of its occurrence.  Danger is often the best counterirritant in cases of mental suffering; he found a solace in careless exposure of his life, and learned to endure the trials of each day better by dwelling in imagination on the possibility that it might be the last for him and the home that was his.

Time, the great consoler, helped these influences, and he gradually fell into more easy and less dangerous habits of life.  He ceased from his more perilous rambles.  He thought less of the danger from the great overhanging rocks and forests; they had hung there for centuries; it was not very likely they would crash or slide in his time.  He became accustomed to all Elsie’s strange looks and ways.  Old Sophy dressed her with ruffles round her neck, and hunted up the red coral branch with silver bells which the little toothless Dudleys had bitten upon for a hundred years.  By an infinite effort, her father forced himself to become the companion of this child, for whom he had such a mingled feeling, but whose presence was always a trial to him, and often a terror.

At a cost which no human being could estimate, he had done his duty, and in some degree reaped his reward.  Elsie grew up with a kind of filial feeling for him, such as her nature was capable of.  She never would obey him; that was not to be looked for.  Commands, threats, punishments, were out of the question with her; the mere physical effects of crossing her will betrayed themselves in such changes of expression and manner that it would have been senseless to attempt to govern her in any such way.  Leaving her mainly to herself, she could be to some extent indirectly influenced,—­not otherwise.  She called her father “Dudley,” as if he had been her brother.  She ordered everybody and would be ordered by none.

Who could know all these things, except the few people of the household?  What wonder, therefore, that ignorant and shallow persons laid the blame on her father of those peculiarities which were freely talked about,—­of those darker tendencies which were hinted of in whispers?  To all this talk, so far as it reached him, he was supremely indifferent, not only with the indifference which all gentlemen feel to the gossip of their inferiors, but with a charitable calmness which did not wonder or blame.  He knew that his position was not simply a difficult, but an impossible one, and schooled himself to bear his destiny as well as he might, and report himself only at Headquarters.