Whether Dudley Veneer would ever find a breathing image near enough to his ideal one, to fill the desolate chamber of his heart, or not, was very doubtful.  Some gracious and gentle woman, whose influence would steal upon him as the first low words of prayer after that interval of silent mental supplication known to one of our simpler forms of public worship, gliding into his consciousness without hurting its old griefs, herself knowing the chastening of sorrow, and subdued into sweet acquiescence with the Divine will,—­some such woman as this, if Heaven should send him such, might call him back to the world of happiness, from which he seemed forever exiled.  He could never again be the young lover who walked through the garden-alleys all red with roses in the old dead and buried June of long ago.  He could never forget the bride of his youth, whose image, growing phantomlike with the lapse of years, hovered over him like a dream while waking and like a reality in dreams.  But if it might be in God’s good providence that this desolate life should come under the influence of human affections once more, what an ecstasy of renewed existence was in store for him!  His life had not all been buried under that narrow ridge of turf with the white stone at its head.  It seemed so for a while; but it was not and could not and ought not to be so.  His first passion had been a true and pure one; there was no spot or stain upon it.  With all his grief there blended no cruel recollection of any word or look he would have wished to forget.  All those little differences, such as young married people with any individual flavor in their characters must have, if they are tolerably mated, had only added to the music of existence, as the lesser discords admitted into some perfect symphony, fitly resolved, add richness and strength to the whole harmonious movement.  It was a deep wound that Fate had inflicted on him; nay, it seemed like a mortal one; but the weapon was clean, and its edge was smooth.  Such wounds must heal with time in healthy natures, whatever a false sentiment may say, by the wise and beneficent law of our being.  The recollection of a deep and true affection is rather a divine nourishment for a life to grow strong upon than a poison to destroy it.

Dudley Venner’s habitual sadness could not be laid wholly to his early bereavement.  It was partly the result of the long struggle between natural affection and duty, on one side, and the involuntary tendencies these had to overcome, on the other,—­between hope and fear, so long in conflict that despair itself would have been like an anodyne, and he would have slept upon some final catastrophe with the heavy sleep of a bankrupt after his failure is proclaimed.  Alas! some new affection might perhaps rekindle the fires of youth in his heart; but what power could calm that haggard terror of the parent which rose with every morning’s sun and watched with every evening star,—­what power save alone that of him who comes bearing the inverted torch, and leaving after him only the ashes printed with his footsteps?