ts. And so he tried to settle down into a
kind of mechanical altruism, in which the reflexes of habit should take
the place of that daily renewal of faith and enthusiasm which had been
fed from the springs of his own joy.

* * * * *

The autumn came and passed into winter; and after Mr. Langhope's
re-establishment in town Amherst began to resume his usual visits to his
step-daughter.

His natural affection for the little girl had been deepened by the
unforeseen manner in which her fate had been entrusted to him. The
thought of Bessy, softened to compunction by the discovery that her love
had persisted under their apparently hopeless estrangement--this
feeling, intensified to the verge of morbidness by the circumstances
attending her death, now sought expression in a passionate devotion to
her child. Accident had, in short, created between Bessy and himself a
retrospective sympathy which the resumption of life together would have
dispelled in a week--one of the exhalations from the past that depress
the vitality of those who linger too near the grave of dead experiences.

Since Justine's departure Amherst had felt himself still more drawn to
Cicely; but his relation to the child was complicated by the fact that
she would not be satisfied as to the cause of her step-mother's absence.
Whenever Amherst came to town, her first question was for Justine; and
her memory had the precocious persistence sometimes developed in
children too early deprived of their natural atmosphere of affection.
Cicely had always been petted and adored, at odd times and by divers
people; but some instinct seemed to tell her that, of all the tenderness
bestowed on her, Justine's most resembled the all-pervading motherly
element in which the child's heart expands without ever being conscious
of its needs.

If it had been embarrassing to evade Cicely's questions in June it
became doubly so as the months passed, and the pretext of Justine's
ill-health grew more and more difficult to sustain. And in the following
March Amherst was suddenly called from Hanaford by the news that the
little girl herself was ill. Serious complications had developed from a
protracted case of scarlet fever, and for two weeks the child's fate was
uncertain. Then she began to recover, and in the joy of seeing life come
back to her, Mr. Langhope and Amherst felt as though they must not only
gratify every wish she expressed, but try to guess at