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.

One overhanging cliff was a favorite haunt of his. It frowned upon his
home beneath in a very menacing way; he noticed slight seams and fissures
that looked ominous;--what would happen, if it broke off some time or
other and came crashing down on the fields an