t blessing which
could have happened to his daughter was his death. But, as by some
strange and merciful law of compensation often occurs, Christian,
inheriting mind and person from him, had inherited temperament,
disposition, character from the lowly-born mother, who was every thing
that he was not, and who had lived just long enough to stamp on the
girl of thirteen a moral impress which could resist all contamination,
and leave behind a lovely dream of motherhood that might, perhaps--
God knows!--have been diviner than the reality.

These things Dr. Grey, brought accidentally into contact with Christian
Oakley on business matters after her father's lamentable death, speedily
discovered for himself; and the result was one of those sudden resolves
which in some men spring from mere passion, in others from an
instinct so deep and true that they are not to be judged by ordinary
rules. People call it "love at first sight," and sometimes tell wonderful
stories of how a man sees, quite unexpectedly, some sweet, strange, and
yet mysteriously familiar face, which takes possession of his fancy with
an almost supernatural force. He says to himself, "That woman shall be
my wife;" and some day, months or years after, he actually marries her;
even as, within a twelvemonth, having waited silently until she was
twenty-one, Dr. Grey married Christian Oakley.

But until within a few weeks ago she herself had had no idea of the
kind. She intensely respected him; her gratitude for his fatherly care
and kindness was almost boundless; but marrying him, or marrying at
all, was quite foreign to her thoughts. How things had come about even
yet she could hardly remember or comprehend. All was a perfect
dream. It seemed another person, and not she, who was suddenly
changed from Mrs. Ferguson's poor governess, without a friend or
relative in the wide world, to the wife of the Master of Saint Bede's.

That she could have married, or been thought to have married him, for
aught but his own good and generous self, or that the mastership of
Saint Bede's, his easy income, and his high reputation had any thing to
do with it, never once crossed her imagination. She was so simple; her
forlorn, shut-up, unhappy life had kept her, if wildly romantic, so
intensely, childishly true, that, whatever objections she had to Dr.
Grey's offer, the idea that this could form one of them--that any one
could suspect her--her, Christian Oakley--of marrying for