ave a touch of character, a slight discord,
which made the harmony finer. It was not, perhaps, beautiful in the
highest sense of the word. The girl must have been too young, too slight,
too little developed for actual beauty; but a face which so invited love
and confidence I never saw. One smiled at it with instinctive affection.
"What a sweet face!" I said. "What a lovely girl! Who is she? Is this one
of the relations you were speaking of on the other side?"

My father made me no reply. He stood aside, looking at it as if he knew
it too well to require to look,--as if the picture was already in his
eyes. "Yes," he said, after an interval, with a long-drawn breath, "she
was a lovely girl, as you say."

"Was?--then she is dead. What a pity!" I said; "what a pity! so young and
so sweet!"

We stood gazing at her thus, in her beautiful stillness and calm,--two
men, the younger of us full-grown and conscious of many experiences, the
other an old man,--before this impersonation of tender youth. At length
he said, with a slight tremulousness in his voice, "Does nothing suggest
to you who she is, Phil?"

I turned round to look at him with profound astonishment, but he turned
away from my look. A sort of quiver passed over his face. "That is your
mother," he said, and walked suddenly away, leaving me there.

My mother!

I stood for a moment in a kind of consternation before the white-robed
innocent creature, to me no more than a child; then a sudden laugh broke
from me, without any will of mine something ludicrous, as well as
something awful, was in it. When the laugh was over, I found myself with
tears in my eyes, gazing, holding my breath. The soft features seemed to
melt, the lips to move, the anxiety in the eyes to become a personal
inquiry. Ah, no! nothing of the kind; only because of the water in mine.
My mother! oh, fair and gentle creature, scarcely woman, how could any
man's voice call her by that name! I had little idea enough of what it
meant,--had heard it laughed at, scoffed at, reverenced, but never had
learned to place it even among the ideal powers of life. Yet if it meant
anything at all, what it meant was worth thinking of. What did she ask,
looking at me with those eyes? What would she have said if "those lips
had language"? If I had known her only as Cowper did--with a child's
recollection--there might have been some thread, some faint but
comprehensible link, between us; but now all that I felt was the