. 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 and roofs below? He
thought of such a possible catastrophe with a singular indifference, in
fact with a feeling almost like pleasure. It would be such a swift and
thorough solution of this great problem of life he was working out
in ever-recurring daily anguish! The remote possibility of such a
catastrophe had frightened some timid dwellers beneath The Mountain to
other places of residence; here