of her two pupils in the daily intimacy of
twelve years. Those natures, which she believed herself to have sounded
through all their depths, had been suddenly tried in the sharp ordeal
of affliction. How had they come out from the test? As her previous
experience had prepared her to see them? No: in flat contradiction to
it.

What did such a result as this imply?

Thoughts came to her, as she asked herself that question, which have
startled and saddened us all.

Does there exist in every human being, beneath that outward and visible
character which is shaped into form by the social influences surrounding
us, an inward, invisible disposition, which is part of ourselves, which
education may indirectly modify, but can never hope to change? Is
the philosophy which denies this and asserts that we are born with
dispositions like blank sheets of paper a philosophy which has failed
to remark that we are not born with blank faces--a philosophy which has
never compared together two infants of a few days old, and has never
observed that those infants are not born with blank tempers for mothers
and nurses to fill up at will? Are there, infinitely varying with each
individual, inbred forces of Good and Evil in all of us, deep down below
the reach of mortal encouragement and mortal repression--hidden Good and
hidden Evil, both alike at the mercy of the liberating opportunity
and the sufficient temptation? Within these earthly limits, is earthly
Circumstance ever the key; and can no human vigilance warn us beforehand
of the forces imprisoned in ourselves which that key _may_ unlock?

For the first time, thoughts such as these rose darkly--as shadowy and
terrible possibilities--in Miss Garth's mind. For the first time, she
associated those possibilities with the past conduct and characters,
with the future lives and fortunes of the orphan sisters.

Searching, as in a glass darkly, into the two natures, she felt her way,
doubt by doubt, from one possible truth to another. It might be that
the upper surface of their characters was all that she had, thus far,
plainly seen in Norah and Magdalen. It might be that the unalluring
secrecy and reserve of one sister, the all-attractive openness and high
spirits of the other, were more or less referable, in each case, to
those physical causes which work toward the production of moral results.
It might be, that under the surface so formed--a surface which there had
been nothing, hitherto, in