erything, were poor and
in hard money troubles. Daniel felt the presence of a new guest who
seemed to come with an enigmatic veiled face, and to carry
dimly-conjectured, dreaded revelations. The ardor which he had given to
the imaginary world in his books suddenly rushed toward his own history
and spent its pictorial energy there, explaining what he knew,
representing the unknown. The uncle whom he loved very dearly took the
aspect of a father who held secrets about him--who had done him a
wrong--yes, a wrong: and what had become of his mother, for whom he
must have been taken away?--Secrets about which he, Daniel, could never
inquire; for to speak or to be spoken to about these new thoughts
seemed like falling flakes of fire to his imagination. Those who have
known an impassioned childhood will understand this dread of utterance
about any shame connected with their parents. The impetuous advent of
new images took possession of him with the force of fact for the first
time told, and left him no immediate power for the reflection that he
might be trembling at a fiction of his own. The terrible sense of
collision between a strong rush of feeling and the dread of its
betrayal, found relief at length in big slow tears, which fell without
restraint until the voice of Mr. Fraser was heard saying:

"Daniel, do you see that you are sitting on the bent pages of your
book?"

Daniel immediately moved the book without turning round, and after
holding it before him for an instant, rose with it and walked away into
the open grounds, where he could dry his tears unobserved. The first
shock of suggestion past, he could remember that he had no certainty
how things really had been, and that he had been making conjectures
about his own history, as he had often made stories about Pericles or
Columbus, just to fill up the blanks before they became famous. Only
there came back certain facts which had an obstinate reality,--almost
like the fragments of a bridge, telling you unmistakably how the arches
lay. And again there came a mood in which his conjectures seemed like a
doubt of religion, to be banished as an offense, and a mean prying
after what he was not meant to know; for there was hardly a delicacy of
feeling this lad was not capable of. But the summing-up of all his
fluctuating experience at this epoch was, that a secret impression had
come to him which had given him something like a new sense in relation
to all the elements of his