lowing days, the most thorough search was made in every
nook and cranny of those parts of the house which Elsie chiefly haunted,
but nothing was found which might be accused of having been the
intentional cause of the probably accidental sudden illness of the
governess. From this time forward her father was never easy. Should he
keep her apart, or shut her up, for fear of risk to others, and so lose
every chance of restoring her mind to its healthy tone by kindly
influences and intercourse with wholesome natures? There was no proof,
only presumption, as to the agency of Elsie in the matter referred to.
But the doubt was worse, perhaps, than certainty would have been,--for
then he would have known what to do.

He took the old Doctor as his adviser. The shrewd old man listened to
the father's story, his explanations of possibilities, of probabilities,
of dangers, of hopes. When he had got through, the Doctor looked him in
the face steadily, as if he were saying, Is that all?

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