s, and as the reflection of their state. She
was a tremulous little creature, shrinking involuntarily from all
mankind, but in timidity, and no sour repugnance. There was a lack of
human substance in her; it seemed as if, were she to stand up in a
sunbeam, it would pass right through her figure, and trace out the
cracked and dusty window-panes upon the naked floor. But,
nevertheless, the poor child had a heart; and from her mother's gentle
character she had inherited a profound and still capacity of affection.
And so her life was one of love. She bestowed it partly on her father,
but in greater part on an idea.

For Fauntleroy, as they sat by their cheerless fireside,--which was no
fireside, in truth, but only a rusty stove,--had often talked to the
little girl about his former wealth, the noble loveliness of his first
wife, and the beautiful child whom she had given him. Instead of the
fairy tales which other parents tell, he told Priscilla this. And, out
of the loneliness of her sad little existence, Priscilla's love grew,
and tended upward, and twined itself perseveringly around this unseen
sister; as a grapevine might strive to clamber out of a gloomy hollow
among the rocks, and embrace a young tree standing in the sunny warmth
above. It was almost like worship, both in its earnestness and its
humility; nor was it the less humble--though the more earnest--because
Priscilla could claim human kindred with the being whom she, so
devoutly loved. As with worship, too, it gave her soul the refreshment
of a purer atmosphere. Save for this singular, this melancholy, and
yet beautiful affection, the child could hardly have lived; or, had she
lived, with a heart shrunken for lack of any sentiment to fill it, she
must have yielded to the barren miseries of her position, and have
grown to womanhood characterless and worthless. But now, amid all the
sombre coarseness of her father's outward life, and of her own,
Priscilla had a higher and imaginative life within. Some faint gleam
thereof was often visible upon her face. It was as if, in her spiritual
visits to her brilliant sister, a portion of the latter's brightness
had permeated our dim Priscilla, and still lingered, shedding a faint
illumination through the cheerless chamber, after she came back.

As the child grew up, so pallid and so slender, and with much
unaccountable nervousness, and all the weaknesses of neglected infancy
still haunting her, the gross and simp