In the dawn of his manhood he had found that second consciousness for which young men and young women go about looking into each other’s faces, with their sweet, artless aim playing in every feature, and making them beautiful to each other, as to all of us.  He had found his other self early, before he had grown weary in the search and wasted his freshness in vain longings:  the lot of many, perhaps we may say of most, who infringe the patent of our social order by intruding themselves into a life already upon half allowance of the necessary luxuries of existence.  The life he had led for a brief space was not only beautiful in outward circumstance, as old Sophy had described it to the Reverend Doctor.  It was that delicious process of the tuning of two souls to each other, string by string, not without little half-pleasing discords now and then when some chord in one or the other proves to be overstrained or over-lax, but always approaching nearer and nearer to harmony, until they become at last as two instruments with a single voice.  Something more than a year of this blissful doubled consciousness had passed over him when he found himself once more alone,—­alone, save for the little diamond-eyed child lying in the old black woman’s arms, with the coral necklace round—­her throat and the rattle in her hand.

He would not die by his own act.  It was not the way in his family.  There may have been other, perhaps better reasons, but this was enough; he did not come of suicidal stock.  He must live for this child’s sake, at any rate; and yet,—­oh, yet, who could tell with what thoughts he looked upon her?  Sometimes her little features would look placid, and something like a smile would steal over them; then all his tender feelings would rush up, into his eyes, and he would put his arms out to take her from the old woman,—­but all at once her eyes would narrow and she would throw her head back, and a shudder would seize him as he stooped over his child,—­he could not look upon her,—­he could not touch his lips to her cheek; nay, there would sometimes come into his soul such frightful suggestions that he would hurry from the room lest the hinted thought should become a momentary madness and he should lift his hand against the hapless infant which owed him life.

In those miserable days he used to wander all over The Mountain in his restless endeavor to seek some relief for inward suffering in outward action.  He had no thought of throwing himself from the summit of any of the broken cliffs, but he clambered over them recklessly, as having no particular care for his life.  Sometimes he would go into the accursed district where the venomous reptiles were always to be dreaded, and court their worst haunts, and kill all he could come near with a kind of blind fury which was strange in a person of his gentle nature.