patient. He 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 Venner.

"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 twofold 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 ingrafted 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 th