y rose and moved in a restless manner to the window. It
was his favorite refuge in any time of sudden perplexity or doubt, and
this was surely an occasion for both.

"Miss Belinda," he began and then paused, looking out on the hills of
his boyhood, every one of which spoke to him at that moment with a force
that almost sickened his heart and benumbed the faculties of his mind;
"I recognize the love which leads you to speak in this way, and I bow
before it, but--" here his tongue faltered again, that ready tongue
whose quick and persuasive eloquence on public occasions had won for him
the name of Silver-speech among his friends and admirers--"but there are
others who love your Paula also, love her with a yearning that only the
childless can feel or the disappointed appreciate. I had hoped--" here
he left the window and approached her side, "to do more for Paula than
to give her the temporal benefit of a luxurious home and such
instruction as her extraordinary talents demand. If Ona upon seeing and
knowing the child had found she could love her, I had intended to ask
you to yield her to us unreservedly and forever, in short to make her my
child in place of the daughter I have lost. But now--" with a quick
gesture he began pacing the floor and left the sentence unfinished.

Miss Belinda's eyes which were of a light grey, wholly without beauty
but with strange flashes of expression in them, left the fire and fell
upon his face, and a tear of real feeling gathered beneath her lids.

"I had no idea," said he, "that you cherished any such intention as
that. If I had I might have worded my apprehensions differently. The
yearning feeling of which you speak, I can easily understand, also the
strength of the determination it must take on the part of a man like
yourself, to give up a hope of this nature. Yet--" Seeing him pause in
his hurried pacing and open his lips as if to speak, she deferentially
stopped.

"Miss Belinda," said he, in the firm and steadfast way more in keeping
with his features than his agitated manner of a moment before, "I cannot
give it up. The injury it would do me is greater than the harm, which
one of Paula's lofty nature would be apt to acquire in any atmosphere
into which she might chance to be introduced. She is not a child, Miss
Belinda, though we allude to her as such. The texture of those
principles which you have instilled into her breast, is of no such weak
material as to give way to the first