him.

Felicia hurried to the door, sobbing with excitement. As she reached it
Dixon entered. Melrose spoke a few peremptory words to him, and she found
herself walking through the gallery, Dixon's hand on her arm, while he
muttered and lamented beside her.

"'And the Lord hardened Pharaoh's heart.' Aye, it's the Lord--it's the
Lord. Oh! Missie, Missie--I was a fool to let yo' in. Yo've been nowt but
a new stone o' stumblin'; an' the Lord knows there's offences enoof
already!"

Meanwhile, in the room from which his daughter had been driven, Melrose
had risen from his seat, and was moving hither and thither, every now and
then taking up some object in the crowded tables, pretending to look at
it, and putting it down again. He was pursued, tormented all the while by
swarming thoughts--visualizations. That child would outlive him--her
father--perhaps by a half century. The flesh and blood sprung from his
own life, would go on enjoying and adventuring, for fifty years, perhaps,
after he had been laid in his resented grave. And the mind which would
have had no existence had he not lived, would hold till death the
remembrance of what he had just said and done--a child's only remembrance
of her father.

He stood, looking back upon his life, and quite conscious of some fatal
element in the moment which had just gone by. It struck him as a kind of
moral tale. Some men would say that God had once more, and finally,
offered him "a place of repentance"--through this strange and tardy
apparition of his daughter. A ghostly smile flickered. The man of the
world knew best. "Let no man break with his own character." That was the
real text which applied. And he had followed it. Circumstance and his own
will had determined, twenty years earlier, that he had had enough of
women-kind. His dealings with them had been many and various! But at a
given moment he had put an end to them forever. And no false
sentimentalism should be allowed to tamper with the thing done.

At this point he found himself sinking into his chair; and must needs
confess himself somewhat shaken by what had happened. He was angry with
his physical weakness, and haunted in spite of himself by the hue and
fragrance of that youth he had just been watching--there--at the corner
of the table--beside the Watteau sketch. He sat staring at the
drawing....

Till the threatened vitality within again asserted itself; beat off the
besieging thoughts; and clutched fiercely at