spoke with her as usual, made some slight
alteration in his prescriptions, and left the room with a kind, cheerful
look. He met her father on the stairs.

"Is it as I thought?" said Dudley Veneer.

"There is everything to fear," the Doctor said, "and not much, I am
afraid, to hope. Does not her face recall to you one that you remember,
as never before?"

"Yes," her father answered,--"oh, yes! What is the meaning of this
change which has come over her features, and her voice, her temper, her
whole being? Tell me, oh, tell me, what is it? Can it be that the curse
is passing away, and my daughter is to be restored to me,--such as her
mother would have had her,--such as her mother was?"

"Walk out with me into the garden," the Doctor said, "and I will tell you
all I know and all I think about this great mystery of Elsie's life."

They walked out together, and the Doctor began: "She has lived a double
being, as it were,--the consequence of the blight which fell upon her in
the dim period before consciousness. You can see what she might have
been but for this. You know that for these eighteen years her whole
existence has taken its character from that influence which we need not
name. But you will remember that few of the lower forms of life last as
human beings do; and thus it might have been hoped and trusted with some
show of reason, as I have always suspected you hoped and trusted, perhaps
more confidently than myself, that the lower nature which had become
engrafted on the higher would die out and leave the real woman's life she
inherited to outlive this accidental principle which had so poisoned her
childhood and youth. I believe it is so dying out; but I am
afraid,--yes, I must say it, I fear it has involved the centres of life
in its own decay. There is hardly any pulse at Elsie's wrist; no
stimulants seem to rouse her; and it looks as if life were slowly
retreating inwards, so that by-and-by she will sleep as those who lie
down in the cold and never wake."

Strange as it may seem, her father heard all this not without deep
sorrow, and such marks of it as his thoughtful and tranquil nature, long
schooled by suffering, claimed or permitted, but with a resignation
itself the measure of his past trials. Dear as his daughter might become
to him, all he dared to ask of Heaven was that she might be restored to
that truer self which lay beneath her false and adventitious being. If
he could once see that th