o knew their secret spring. His
minister had the unsympathetic nature which is common in the meaner
sort of devotees,--persons who mistake spiritual selfishness for
sanctity, and grab at the infinite prize of the great Future and
Elsewhere with the egotism they excommunicate in its hardly more
odious forms of avarice and self-indulgence. How could he speak with
the old physician and the old black woman about a sorrow and a terror
which but to name was to strike dumb the lips of Consolation?

In the dawn of his manhood he had found that second consciousness for
which young men and young women go about looking into each other's
faces, with their sweet, artless aim playing in every feature, and
making them beautiful to each other, as to all of us. He had found his
other self early, before he had grown weary in the search and wasted
his freshness in vain longings: the lot of many, perhaps we may say of
most, who infringe the patent of our social order by intruding
themselves into a life already upon half-allowance of the necessary
luxuries of existence. The life he had led for a brief space was not
only beautiful in outward circumstance, as old Sophy had described it
to the Reverend Doctor. It was that delicious process of the tuning of
two souls to each other, string by string, not without little
half-pleasing discords now and then when some chord in one or the
other proves to be over-strained or over-lax, but always approaching
nearer and nearer to harmony, until they become at last as two
instruments with a single voice. 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 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