All this passed away, and left her, of course, weaker than before.  But this was not the only influence the unexplained paroxysm had left behind it.  From this time forward there was a change in her whole expression and her manner.  The shadows ceased flitting over her features, and the old woman, who watched her from day to day and from hour to hour as a mother watches her child, saw the likeness she bore to her mother coming forth more and more, as the cold glitter died out of the diamond eyes, and the stormy scowl disappeared from the dark brows and low forehead.

With all the kindness and indulgence her father had bestowed upon her, Elsie had never felt that he loved her.  The reader knows well enough what fatal recollections and associations had frozen up the springs of natural affection in his breast.  There was nothing in the world he would not do for Elsie.  He had sacrificed his whole life to her.  His very seeming carelessness about restraining her was all calculated; he knew that restraint would produce nothing but utter alienation.  Just so far as she allowed him, he shared her studies, her few pleasures, her thoughts; but she was essentially solitary and uncommunicative.  No person, as was said long ago, could judge him, because his task was not merely difficult, but simply impracticable to human powers.  A nature like Elsie’s had necessarily to be studied by itself, and to be followed in its laws where it could not be led.

Every day, at different hours, during the whole of his daughter’s illness, Dudley Venner had sat by her, doing all he could to soothe and please her.  Always the same thin film of some emotional non-conductor between them; always that kind of habitual regard and family-interest, mingled with the deepest pity on one side and a sort of respect on the other, which never warmed into outward evidences of affection.

It was after this occasion, when she had been so profoundly agitated by a seemingly insignificant cause, that her father and Old Sophy were sitting, one at one side of her bed and one at the other.  She had fallen into a light slumber.  As they were looking at her, the same thought came into both their minds at the same moment.  Old Sophy spoke for both, as she said, in a low voice,

“It ’s her mother’s look,—­it ’s her mother’s own face right over again,—­she never look’ so before, the Lord’s hand is on her!  His will be done!”

When Elsie woke and lifted her languid eyes upon her father’s face, she saw in it a tenderness, a depth of affection, such as she remembered at rare moments of her childhood, when she had won him to her by some unusual gleam of sunshine in her fitful temper.

“Elsie, dear,” he said, “we were thinking how much your expression was sometimes like that of your sweet mother.  If you could but have seen her, so as to remember her!”