ith Cousin Monica for the remainder of my
nonage.

You will say then that my spirits and my serenity were quite restored. Not
quite. How marvellously lie our anxieties, in filmy layers, one over the
other! Take away that which has lain on the upper surface for so long--the
care of cares--the only one, as it seemed to you, between your soul and the
radiance of Heaven--and straight you find a new stratum there. As physical
science tells us no fluid is without its skin, so does it seem with this
fine medium of the soul, and these successive films of care that form upon
its surface on mere contact with the upper air and light.

What was my new trouble? A very fantastic one, you will say--the illusion
of a self-tormentor. It was the face of Uncle Silas which haunted me.
Notwithstanding the old pale smile, there was a shrinking grimness, and the
always-averted look.

Sometimes I fancied his mind was disordered. I could not account for the
eerie lights and shadows that flickered on his face, except so. There was
a look of shame and fear of me, amazing as that seems, in the sheen of his
peaked smile.

I thought, 'Perhaps he blames himself for having tolerated Dudley's
suit--for having urged it on grounds of personal distress--for having
altogether lowered, though under sore temptation, both himself and his
office; and he thinks that he has forfeited my respect.'

Such was my analysis; but in the _coup-d'oeil_ of that white face that
dazzled me in darkness, and haunted my daily reveries with a faded light,
there was an intangible character of the insidious and the terrible.

CHAPTER LIV

_IN SEARCH OF MR. CHARKE'S SKELETON_

On the whole, however, I was unspeakably relieved. Dudley Ruthyn, Esq.,
and Mrs. D. Ruthyn, were now skimming the blue waves on the wings of the
_Seamew_, and every morning widened the distance between us, which was to
go on increasing until it measured a point on the antipodes. The Liverpool
paper containing this golden line was carefully preserved in my room; and
like the gentleman who, when much tried by the shrewish heiress whom he
had married, used to retire to his closet and read over his marriage
settlement, I used, when blue devils haunted me, to unfold my newspaper and
read the paragraph concerning the _Seamew_.

The day I now speak of was a dismal one of sleety snow. My own room seemed
to me cheerier than the lonely parlour, where I could not have had good
Mary Quince so decorousl