of bridges, past glistening palace fronts, again in the deep shade of a
wall of buildings. Wherever the light struck it was like molten silver;
facades and carvings stood sharply revealed; every beauty of the weird
city seemed heightened and spiritualised; almost glorified; while the
silence, the outward peace, gave still more the impression of a place
fair-like and unreal. It was truly a wonderful sail, a marvellous
passage through an enchanted city, never to be forgotten by either of
the two young people; who went for some distance in a silence as if a
spell were upon them too.

At Dolly's age, with all its elasticity, some aspects of trouble are
more overwhelming than in later years. When one has not measured life,
not learned yet the relations and proportions of things, one imagines
the whole earth darkened by the cloud which is but hiding the sun from
the spot where our feet stand. And before one has seen what wonders
Time can do, the ruin wrought by an avalanche or a flood seems
irreparable. It is inconceivable, that the bare and torn rocks should
be clothed again, the choking piles of rubbish ever be anything but
dismal and unsightly, the stripped fields ever be green and
flourishing, or the torn-up trees be ever replaced. Yet Time does it
all. Come after a while to look again, and the traces of past
devastation are not easy to find; nature's weaving has so covered, and
nature's embroidery has so adorned, the bald places. In human life
there is something like this often done; though, as I said, youth wots
not of it and does not believe in it. So Dolly this night saw her
little life a wilderness, which had been a garden of flowers. Some
flowers might be lifting their heads yet, but what Dolly looked at was
the destruction. Wrought by her own father's hand! I cannot tell how
that thought stung and crushed Dolly. What would anything else in the
world have mattered, so she could have kept him? help could have been
found; but to lose _him_, her father, and not by death, but by change,
by dishonour, by loss of his identity--Dolly felt indeed that a storm
had come upon the little garden of her life from the sweeping ruin of
which there could be no revival. She could hardly hold her head up for
a long distance of that midnight sail; yet she did, and noted as they
passed the fairy glories of the scene. Just noted them, to deepen, if
possible, the pangs at her heart. All this beauty, all this outward
delight, mocked the