He had grown gentle under this discipline.  His hair was just beginning to be touched with silver, and his expression was that of habitual sadness and anxiety.  He had no counsellor, as we have seen, to turn to, who did not know either too much or too little.  He had no heart to rest upon and into which he might unburden himself of the secrets and the sorrows that were aching in his own breast.  Yet he had not allowed himself to run to waste in the long time since he was left alone to his trials and fears.  He had resisted the seductions which always beset solitary men with restless brains overwrought by depressing agencies.  He disguised no misery to himself with the lying delusion of wine.  He sought no sleep from narcotics, though he lay with throbbing, wide-open eyes through all the weary hours of the night.

It was understood between Dudley Veneer and old Doctor Kittredge that Elsie was a subject of occasional medical observation, on account of certain mental peculiarities which might end in a permanent affection of her reason.  Beyond this nothing was said, whatever may have been in the mind of either.  But Dudley Veneer had studied Elsie’s case in the light of all the books he could find which might do anything towards explaining it.  As in all cases where men meddle with medical science for a special purpose, having no previous acquaintance with it, his imagination found what it wanted in the books he read, and adjusted it to the facts before him.  So it was he came to cherish those two fancies before alluded to that the ominous birthmark she had carried from infancy might fade and become obliterated, and that the age of complete maturity might be signalized by an entire change in her physical and mental state.  He held these vague hopes as all of us nurse our only half-believed illusions.  Not for the world would he have questioned his sagacious old medical friend as to the probability or possibility of their being true.  We are very shy of asking questions of those who know enough to destroy with one word the hopes we live on.

In this life of comparative seclusion to which the father had doomed himself for the sake of his child, he had found time for large and varied reading.  The learned Judge Thornton confessed himself surprised at the extent of Dudley Veneer’s information.  Doctor Kittredge found that he was in advance of him in the knowledge of recent physiological discoveries.  He had taken pains to become acquainted with agricultural chemistry; and the neighboring farmers owed him some useful hints about the management of their land.  He renewed his old acquaintance with the classic authors.  He loved to warm his pulses with Homer and calm them down with Horace.  He received all manner of new books and periodicals, and gradually gained an interest in the events of the passing time.  Yet he remained almost a hermit, not absolutely refusing to see his neighbors, nor even churlish towards them, but on the other hand not cultivating any intimate relations with them.