ther and daughter sat down at the luncheon-table. Ansgarius was
always his own master on Saturdays, when the Pastor was taken up with
his sermon.

You would not easily have found two people who suited each other better,
or who lived on terms of more intimate friendship, than the Pastor and
his eighteen-year-old daughter. She had been motherless from childhood;
but there was so much that was womanly in her gentle, even-tempered
father, that the young girl, who remembered her mother only as a pale
face that smiled on her, felt the loss rather as a peaceful sorrow than
as a bitter pain.

And for him she came to fill up more and more, as she ripened, the void
that had been left in his soul; and all the tenderness, which at his
wife's death had been so clouded in sorrow and longing, now gathered
around the young woman who grew up under his eyes; so that his sorrow
was assuaged and peace descended upon his mind.

Therefore he was able to be almost like a mother to her. He taught her
to look upon the world with his own pure, untroubled eyes. It became
the better part of his aim in life to hedge her around and protect her
fragile and delicate nature from all the soilures and perturbations
which make the world so perplexing, so difficult, and so dangerous an
abiding-place.

When they stood together on the hill beside the Parsonage, gazing forth
over the surging sea, he would say: "Look, Rebecca! yonder is an image
of life--of that life in which the children of this world are tossed to
and fro; in which impure passions rock the frail skiff about, to litter
the shore at last with its shattered fragments. He only can defy the
storm who builds strong bulwarks around a pure heart--at his feet the
waves break powerlessly."

Rebecca clung to her father; she felt so safe by his side. There was
such a radiance over all he said, that when she thought of the future
she seemed to see the path before her bathed in light. For all her
questions he had an answer; nothing was too lofty for him, nothing too
lowly. They exchanged ideas without the least constraint, almost like
brother and sister.

And yet one point remained dark between them. On all other matters she
would question her father directly; here she had to go indirectly to
work, to get round something which she could never get over.

She knew her father's great sorrow; she knew what happiness he had
enjoyed and lost. She followed with the warmest sympathy the varying
fortunes