curious
incongruity. Poor child! I said to myself; so sweet a creature: poor
little tender soul! as if she had been a little sister, a child of
mine,--but my mother! I cannot tell how long I stood looking at her,
studying the candid, sweet face, which surely had germs in it of
everything that was good and beautiful; and sorry, with a profound
regret, that she had died and never carried these promises to
fulfillment. Poor girl! poor people who had loved her! These were my
thoughts; with a curious vertigo and giddiness of my whole being in the
sense of a mysterious relationship, which it was beyond my power to
understand.

Presently my father came back, possibly because I had been a long time
unconscious of the passage of the minutes, or perhaps because he was
himself restless in the strange disturbance of his habitual calm. He came
in and put his arm within mine, leaning his weight partially upon me,
with an affectionate suggestion which went deeper than words. I pressed
his arm to my side: it was more between us two grave Englishmen than any
embracing.

"I cannot understand it," I said.

"No. I don't wonder at that; but if it is strange to you, Phil, think how
much more strange to me! That is the partner of my life. I have never had
another, or thought of another. That--girl! If we are to meet again, as I
have always hoped we should meet again, what am I to say to her,--I, an
old man? Yes; I know what you mean. I am not an old man for my years; but
my years are threescore and ten, and the play is nearly played out. How
am I to meet that young creature? We used to say to each other that it
was forever, that we never could be but one, that it was for life and
death. But what--what am I to say to her, Phil, when I meet her again,
that--that angel? No, it is not her being an angel that troubles me; but
she is so young! She is like my--my granddaughter," he cried, with a
burst of what was half sobs, half laughter; "and she is my wife,--and I
am an old man--an old man! And so much has happened that she could not
understand."

I was too much startled by this strange complaint to know what to say.
It was not my own trouble, and I answered it in the conventional way.

"They are not as we are, sir," I said; "they look upon us with larger,
other eyes than ours."

"Ah! you don't know what I mean," he said quickly; and in the interval he
had subdued his emotion. "At first, after she died, it was my consolation
to think that