he would; for there had come with his increasing sense of his tyrant,
a knowledge that every time he thought of the Shadow it darkened more
deeply than ever, and that in forgetting it lay his only hope of escape
from its power. But withal there was a morbid pleasure, the reflex
influence of habit and indolence, that mingled curiously with his
longing desire to forget his Double, but rendered it impossible to do
so without a greater effort than he cared to make, or some help from
another hand; and soon that help seemed to come.

When Roger left his home for school, he left in the quaint oak cradle
a little baby-sister, too young to have a place in his thought as a
definite existence; but after an absence of two years he came back to
find in her a new phase of life, into which the Shadow could not yet
enter.

The child's name her own childish tongue had softened into "Sunny," a
name that was the natural expression of her sunshiny traits, the clear
gay voice, the tranquil azure eyes, the golden curls, the loving looks,
that made Sunny the darling of the house,--the stray sunbeam that
glanced through the doors, flitted by the heavy wainscots, and danced up
the dusky stairways of that old and solitary dwelling.

When Roger returned, fresh from the rough companionship of school, Sunny
seemed to him a creature of some better race than his own. The Shadow
vanished, for he forgot it in his new devotion to Sunny. Nothing did he
leave undone to please her wayward fancies. In those hot summer-days,
he carried her to a little brook that rippled across the meadow, and,
sitting with her in his arms on the large smooth stones that divided
those shallow waters, held her carefully while she splashed her tiny
dimpled feet in the cool ripples, or grasped vainly at the blue-winged
dragon-flies sailing past, on languid, airy pinions, just beyond her
reach. Or he gathered heaps of daisies for the child to toss into the
shining stream, and see the pale star-like blossoms float smoothly down
till some eddy caught them in its sparkling whirl, and, drenching the
frail, helpless leaves, cast them on the farther shore and went its
careless way. Or he told her, in the afternoons, under some wide
apple-tree, wonderful stories of giants and naughty boys, till she fell
asleep on the sweet hay, where the curious grasshoppers peered at her
with round horny eyes, and velvet-bodied spiders scurried across her
fair curls with six-legged speed, and the rob