y, and they fell like
seeds upon the heart of Miss St. John, took root, and rose in thoughts:
in the heart of a true woman the talk of a child even will take life.

One evening Robert rose from the table, not unwatched of his
grandmother, and sped swiftly and silently through the dark, as was his
custom, to enter the chamber of enchantment. Never before had his hand
failed to alight, sure as a lark on its nest, upon the brass handle of
the door that admitted him to his paradise. It missed it now, and fell
on something damp, and rough, and repellent instead. Horrible, but true
suspicion! While he was at school that day, his grandmother, moved by
what doubt or by what certainty she never revealed, had had the doorway
walled up. He felt the place all over. It was to his hands the living
tomb of his mother's vicar on earth.

He returned to his book, pale as death, but said never a word. The next
day the stones were plastered over.

Thus the door of bliss vanished from the earth. And neither the boy nor
his grandmother ever said that it had been.

PART II.--HIS YOUTH.

CHAPTER I. ROBERT KNOCKS--AND THE DOOR IS NOT OPENED.

The remainder of that winter was dreary indeed. Every time Robert went
up the stair to his garret, he passed the door of a tomb. With that gray
mortar Mary St. John was walled up, like the nun he had read of in the
Marmion she had lent him. He might have rung the bell at the street
door, and been admitted into the temple of his goddess, but a certain
vague terror of his grannie, combined with equally vague qualms of
conscience for having deceived her, and the approach in the far distance
of a ghastly suspicion that violins, pianos, moonlight, and lovely women
were distasteful to the over-ruling Fate, and obnoxious to the vengeance
stored in the gray cloud of his providence, drove him from the awful
entrance of the temple of his Isis.

Nor did Miss St. John dare to make any advances to the dreadful old
lady. She would wait. For Mrs. Forsyth, she cared nothing about
the whole affair. It only gave her fresh opportunity for smiling
condescensions about 'poor Mrs. Falconer.' So Paradise was over and
gone.

But though the loss of Miss St. John and the piano was the last blow,
his sorrow did not rest there, but returned to brood over his bonny
lady. She was scattered to the winds. Would any of her ashes ever rise
in the corn, and moan in the ripening wind of autumn? Might not some
atoms of the