und my neck, and trying
to lead me with her from the door. "Come back, or you will drive me
mad!" she repeated loudly, drawing me away towards my father.

He rose instantly from his chair.

"Clara," he said, "I command you, leave him!" He advanced a few steps
towards me. "Go!" he cried; "if you are human in your villany, you will
release me from this!"

I whispered in her ear, "I will write, love--I will write," and
disengaged her arms from my neck--they were hanging round it weakly,
already! As I passed the door, I turned back, and looked again into the
room for the last time.

Clara was in my father's arms, her head lay on his shoulder, her face
was as still in its heavenly calmness as if the world and the world's
looks knew it no more, and the only light that fell on it now, was light
from the angel's eyes. She had fainted.

He was standing with one arm round her, his disengaged hand was
searching impatiently over the wall behind him for the bell, and his
eyes were fixed in anguish and in love unutterable on the peaceful face,
hushed in its sad repose so close beneath his own. For one moment, I saw
him thus, ere I closed the door--the next, I had left the house.

I never entered it again--I have never seen my father since.

IV.

We are seldom able to discover under any ordinary conditions of
self-knowledge, how intimately that spiritual part of us, which is
undying, can attach to itself and its operations the poorest objects
of that external world around us, which is perishable. In the ravelled
skein, the slightest threads are the hardest to follow. In analysing the
associations and sympathies which regulate the play of our passions, the
simplest and homeliest are the last that we detect. It is only when the
shock comes, and the mind recoils before it--when joy is changed into
sorrow, or sorrow into joy--that we really discern what trifles in the
outer world our noblest mental pleasures, or our severest mental pains,
have made part of themselves; atoms which the whirlpool has drawn into
its vortex, as greedily and as surely as the largest mass.

It was reserved for me to know this, when--after a moment's pause before
the door of my father's house, more homeless, then, than the poorest
wretch who passed me on the pavement, and had wife or kindred to shelter
him in a garret that night--my steps turned, as of old, in the direction
of North Villa.

Again I passed over the scene of my daily pilgrimage, always