r future she read a punishment equal to the daring
wherewith she had aspired. Excepting her poor old father, not a living
soul that held account of her. She might live for years and years. Her
father would die, and then no smallest tribute of love or admiration
would be hers for ever. More than that; perforce she must gain her own
living, and in doing so she must expose herself to all manner of
insulting wonder and pity. Was it a life that could be lived?

Hour after hour she sat with her face buried in her hands. She did not
weep; tears were trivial before a destiny such as this. But groans and
smothered cries often broke the silence of her solitude--cries of
frenzied revolt, wordless curses. Once she rose up suddenly, passed
through the middle room, and out on to the staircase; there a gap in
the wall, guarded by iron railings breast-high, looked down upon the
courtyard. She leaned forward over the bar and measured the distance
that separated her from the ground; a ghastly height! Surely one would
not feel much after such a fall? In any case, the crashing agony of but
an instant. Had not this place tempted other people before now?

Some one coming upstairs made her shrink back into her room, She had
felt the horrible fascination of that sheer depth, and thought of it
for days, thought of it until she dreaded to quit the tenement, lest a
power distinct from will should seize and hurl her to destruction. She
knew that that must not happen here; for all her self-absorption, she
could not visit with such cruelty the one heart that loved her. And
thinking of him, she understood that her father's tenderness was not
wholly the idle thing that it had been to her at first; her love could
never equal his, had never done so in her childhood, but she grew
conscious of a soothing power in the gentle and timid devotion with
which he tended her. His appearance of an evening was something more
than a relief after the waste of hours which made her day. The rough,
passionate man made himself as quiet and sympathetic as a girl when he
took his place by her. Compared with her, his other children were as
nothing to him. Impossible that Clara should not be touched by the
sense that he who had everything to forgive, whom she had despised and
abandoned, behaved now as one whose part it is to beseech forgiveness.
She became less impatient when he tried to draw her into conversation;
when he hold her thin soft hand in those rude ones of his, s