h to be in society. His wife died
young, they say, and this girl is his only daughter. I wish you could
hear her sing!"

"For that matter, I wish I might," said Reanda, who was passionately
fond of music.

CHAPTER XVIII.

SEVENTEEN years had scored their account on Angus Dalrymple's hard face,
and one great sorrow had set an even deeper mark upon him--a sorrow so
deep and so overwhelming that none had ever dared to speak of it to him.
And he was not the man to bear any affliction resignedly, to feed on
memory, and find rest in the dreams of what had been. Sullenly and
fiercely rebellious against his fate, he went down life, rather than
through it, savage and silent, for the most part, Nero-like in his wish
that he could end the world at a single blow, himself and all that
lived. Yet it was characteristic of the man that he had not chosen
suicide as a means of escape, as he would have done in his earlier
years, if Maria Addolorata had failed him. It seemed cowardly now, and
he had never done anything cowardly in his life. Through his grief the
sense of responsibility had remained with him, and had kept him alive.
He looked upon his existence not as a state from which he had a right to
escape, but as a personal enemy to be fought with, to be despised, to be
ill-treated barbarously, perhaps, but still as an enemy to murder whom
in cold blood would be an act of cowardice.

There was little more than the mere sense of the responsibility, for he
did little enough to fulfil his obligations. His wife had borne him a
daughter, but it was not in Angus Dalrymple's nature to substitute one
being in his heart for another. He could not love the girl simply
because her mother was dead. He could only spoil her, with a rough idea
that she should be spared all suffering as much as possible, but that if
he gave her what she wanted, he had done all that could be expected of
him. For the rest, he lived his own life.

He had a good intelligence and superior gifts, together with
considerable powers of intellectual acquisition. He had believed in his
youth that he was destined to make great discoveries, and his papers
afterwards showed that he was really on the track of great and new
things. But with his bereavement, all ambition as well as all curiosity
disappeared in one day from his character. Since then he had never gone
back to his studies, which disgusted him and seemed stale and flat. He
grew rudely dogmatical when scienti