k upon that sweet child
again, if haply in the gleam of her pure spirit, something of the noble
and the pure that lay beneath the crust of life might be again revealed
to his longing sight.

"She must be a great girl now," murmured he to himself, "as old as if
not older than she whom Bertram adores so passionately, but she will
always be a child to me, a sweet pure child whose innocence is my
teacher and whose ignorance is my better wisdom. If anything will save
me--"

But here the shadow settled again; when it lifted, the morning ray lay
cool and ghostly over the hearthstone.

IX.

PAULA.

"The stars of midnight shall be dear
To her; and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face."

--WORDSWORTH.

A wintry scene. Snow-piled hills stretching beyond a frozen river. On
the bank a solitary figure tall, dark and commanding, standing with eyes
bent sadly on a long narrow mound at his feet. It is Edward Sylvester
and the mound is the grave of his mother.

It is ten years since he stood upon that spot. In all that time no
memories of his childhood's home, no recollection of that lonely grave
among the pines, had been sufficient to allure him from the city and its
busy round of daily cares. Indeed he had always shrunk at the very name
of the place and never of his own will alluded to it, but the reveries
of a night had awakened a longing that was not to be appeased, and in
the face of his wife's cold look of astonishment and a secret dread in
his own heart, had left his comfortable fireside, for the scenes of his
early life and marriage, and was now standing, in the bleak December
air, gazing down upon the stone that marked his mother's grave.

But tender as were the chords that reverberated at this sight, it was
not to revisit this tomb he had returned to Grotewell. No, that other
vision, the vision of young sweet appreciative life has drawn him more
strongly than the memory of the dead. It was to search out and gaze
again upon the innocent girl, whose eloquent eyes and lofty spirit had
so deeply moved him in the past, that he had braved the chill of the
Connecticut hills and incurred the displeasure of his wife.

Yet when he turned away from that simple headstone and set his face
towards the village streets it was with a sinking of the heart that
first revealed to