poignancy, the light of earlier and happier memories
had begun to struggle with and to soften its thick darkness, and even
that duty which he had confronted with such an effort had become an
endurable habit.

At a period of life when many have been living on the capital of their
acquired knowledge and their youthful stock of sensibilities until
their intellects are really shallower and their hearts emptier than
they were at twenty, Dudley Venner was stronger in thought and
tenderer in soul than in the first freshness of his youth, when he
counted but half his present years. He was now on the verge of that
decade which marks the decline of men who have ceased growing in
knowledge and strength: from forty to fifty a man must move upward, or
the natural falling off in the vigor of life will carry him rapidly
downward. At the entrance of this decade his inward nature was richer
and deeper than in any earlier period of his life. If he could only be
summoned to action, he was capable of noble service. If his sympathies
could only find an outlet, he was never so capable of love as now; for
his natural affections had been gathering in the course of all these
years, and the traces of that ineffaceable calamity of his life were
softened and partially hidden by new growths of thought and feeling,
as the wreck left by a mountain-slide is covered over by the gentle
intrusion of the soft-stemmed herbs which will prepare it for the
stronger vegetation that will bring it once more into harmony with the
peaceful slopes around it.

Perhaps Dudley Venner had not gained so much in worldly wisdom as if
he had been more in society and less in his study. The indulgence with
which he treated his nephew was, no doubt, imprudent. A man more in
the habit of dealing with men would have been more guarded with a
person with Dick's questionable story and unquestionable physiognomy.
But he was singularly unsuspicious, and his natural kindness was an
additional motive to the wish for introducing some variety into the
routine of Elsie's life.

If Dudley Venner did not know just what he wanted at this period of
his life, there were a great many people in the town of Rockland who
thought they did know. He had been a widower long enough,--nigh twenty
year, wa'n't it? He'd been aout to Spraowles's party,--there wa'n't
anything to hender him why he shouldn't stir raound l'k other folks.
What was the reason he didn't go abaout to taown-meetin's, 'n'
Sahba