cidental sudden
illness of the governess. From this time forward her father was never
easy. Should he keep her apart, or shut her up, for fear of risk to
others, and so lose every chance of restoring her mind to its healthy
tone by kindly influences and intercourse with wholesome natures?
There was no proof, only presumption, as to the agency of Elsie in
the matter referred to. But the doubt was worse, perhaps, than
certainty would have been,--for then he would have known what to do.

He took the old Doctor as his adviser. The shrewd old man listened to
the father's story, his explanations of possibilities, of
probabilities, of dangers, of hopes. When he had got through, the
Doctor looked him in the face steadily, as if he were saying, _Is
that all?_

The father's eyes fell. That was not all. There was something at the
bottom of his soul which he could not bear to speak of,--nay, which,
as often as it reared itself through the dark waves of unworded
consciousness into the breathing air of thought, he trod down as the
ruined angels tread down a lost soul trying to come up out of the
seething sea of torture. Only this one daughter! No! God never would
have ordained such a thing. There was nothing ever heard of like it;
it could not be; she was ill,--she would outgrow all these
singularities; he had had an aunt who was peculiar; he had heard that
hysteric girls showed the strangest forms of moral obliquity for a
time, but came right at last. She would change all at once, when her
health got more firmly settled in the course of her growth. Are there
not rough buds that open into sweet flowers? Are there not fruits,
which, while unripe, are not to be tasted or endured, that mature
into the richest taste and fragrance? In God's good time she would
come to her true nature; her eyes would lose that frightful, cold
glitter; her lips would not feel so cold when she pressed them
mechanically against his cheek; and that faint birth-mark, her mother
swooned when she first saw, would fade wholly out,--it was less
marked, surely, now than it used to be!

So Dudley Venner felt, and would have thought, if he had let his
thoughts breathe the air of his soul. But the Doctor read through
words and thoughts and all into the father's consciousness. There are
states of mind that may be shared by two persons in presence of each
other, which remain not only unworded, but _unthoughted_, if such a
word may be coined for our special need. Such