The father’s eyes fell.  This was not all.  There was something at the bottom of his soul which he could not bear to speak of,—­nay, which, as often as it reared itself through the dark waves of unworded consciousness into the breathing air of thought, he trod down as the ruined angels tread down a lost soul, trying to come up out of the seething sea of torture.  Only this one daughter!  No!  God never would have ordained such a thing.  There was nothing ever heard of like it; it could not be; she was ill,—­she would outgrow all these singularities; he had had an aunt who was peculiar; he had heard that hysteric girls showed the strangest forms of moral obliquity for a time, but came right at last.  She would change all at once, when her health got more firmly settled in the course of her growth.  Are there not rough buds that open into sweet flowers?  Are there not fruits, which, while unripe, are not to be tasted or endured, which mature into the richest taste and fragrance?  In God’s good time she would come to her true nature; her eyes would lose that frightful, cold glitter; her lips would not feel so cold when she pressed them against his cheek; and that faint birth-mark, her mother swooned when she first saw, would fade wholly out,—­it was less marked, surely, now than it used to be!

So Dudley Venner felt, and would have thought, if he had let his thoughts breathe the air of his soul.  But the Doctor read through words and thoughts and all into the father’s consciousness.  There are states of mind which may be shared by two persons in presence of each other, which remain not only unworded, but unthoughted, if such a word may be coined for our special need.  Such a mutually interpenetrative consciousness there was between the father and the old physician.  By a common impulse, both of them rose in a mechanical way and went to the western window, where each started, as he saw the other’s look directed towards the white stone which stood in the midst of the small plot of green turf.

The Doctor had, for a moment, forgotten himself but he looked up at the clouds, which were angry, and said, as if speaking of the weather, “It is dark now, but we hope it will clear up by and by.  There are a great many more clouds than rains, and more rains than strokes of lightning, and more strokes of lightning than there are people killed.  We must let this girl of ours have her way, as far as it is safe.  Send away this woman she hates, quietly.  Get her a foreigner for a governess, if you can,—­one that can dance and sing and will teach her.  In the house old Sophy will watch her best.  Out of it you must trust her, I am afraid,—­for she will not be followed round, and she is in less danger than you think.  If she wanders at night, find her, if you can; the woods are not absolutely safe.  If she will be friendly with any young people, have them to see her,—­young men especially.  She will not love any one easily, perhaps not at all; yet love would be more like to bring her right than anything else.  If any young person seems in danger of falling in love with her, send him to me for counsel.”