to his care, took all the love which he
had left. From the moment it began to speak, he centered in its tiny
life all the hope and all the pride of his solitary heart. And the Japha
pride was nearly as great as the Japha heart. She was a pretty child;
not a beauty like her mother or like you, my dear, who however so nearly
resemble her. But for all that, pretty enough to satisfy the eyes of her
secretly doting father, and her openly doting nurse and cousin. I say
secretly doting father. I do not mean by that that he regarded her with
an affection which he never displayed, but that it was his way to lavish
his caresses at home and in the privacy of her little nursery. He never
made a parade of anything but his pride. If he loved her, it was enough
for her to know it. In the street and the houses of their friends, he
was the strict, somewhat severe father, to whom her childish eyes lifted
at first with awe, but afterwards with a quiet defiance, that when I
first saw it, made my heart stand still with unreasoning alarm.

"She was so reserved a child and yet so deeply passionate. From the
beginning I felt that I did not understand her. I loved her; I have
never loved any mortal as I did her--and do; but I could not follow her
impulses or judge of her feelings by her looks.

"When she grew older it was still worse. She never contradicted her
father, or appeared in any open way to disobey his commands, or thwart
him in his plans. Yet she always did what she pleased, and that so
quietly, he frequently did not observe that matters had taken any other
direction, than that which he had himself ordained. 'It is her mother's
tact,' he used to say. Alas it was something more than that; it was her
father's will united to the unscrupulousness of some forgotten ancestor.

"But with the glamour of her eighteen years upon me, I did not recognize
this then, any more than he. I saw her through the magic glasses of my
own absorbing love, and tremble as I frequently would in the still scorn
of her unfathomable passion, I never dreamed she could do anything that
would seriously offend her father's affection or mortify his pride. The
truth is, that Jacqueline did not love us. Say what you will of the
claims of kindred, and the right of every father to his childrens'
regard, Jacqueline Japha accepted the devotion that was lavished upon
her, but she gave none in return. She could not, perhaps. Her father was
too cold in public and too warm in h