f a social outcast.

To do her justice, the girl was consciously not much impressed by this
alleged peril. She had never been aware of any failing such as Victor would
have endowed her with; so far as she could remember she had never been
tempted to commit more venial sins than inhered in lying to Mama Therese
now and then in order to escape unmerited disciplining at the heavy hands
of that industrious virago; and as for thieving, the very thought of
anything of that sort was detestable to Sofia.

But unconsciously, no doubt, the everlasting iteration of Victor's
admonitions had its purposed effect upon that sensitive and impressionable
spirit.

Then, too, by degrees, but all too soon, it became manifest that the memory
of his passionate attachment for her mother possessed Victor to the point
of monomania. It was only with an effort that he could force himself to
talk to Sofia on other subjects. He thought of nothing else while with her;
if she read his eyes aright, often glimpses of weird light flickering in
their opaque depths, like heat lightning of a murky summer's night, fairly
frightened her, and she knew a shuddering perception of the possibility
that Victor was at times in danger of confusing the daughter with the
mother.

"Never was there such resemblance," he once uttered, in a stare. "You are
more like her than she herself!"

Sofia was pardonably puzzled, and looked it.

"I mean, you re-create my vision of the woman I loved and lost--the woman I
saw in her, not the woman she was."

"Lost?" the girl murmured.

The gray countenance took on an added shade of sombre passion. "She never
understood me, she treated me badly. Once, in a fit of pique, she ran away.
I did everything--everything, I tell you!--to win her back, but--"

He choked on bitter recollections--and Sofia was painfully reminded of the
Chinese devil-masks in Victor's study. But the likeness faded even as she
saw it, under her gaze the twisted features were ironed back into their
accustomed cast of austerity.

"Before I could persuade her, you were born.... Then she died."

Sensible though she was of the ellipsis, and afraid it would never be
filled in if she interrupted, Sofia could not help uttering a sound of
regret and pity for the lot of the mother she had never seen, whose
untimely death had ended a life accounted unendurable as Victor's wife, for
reasons unknown but none the less, to the daughter, vaguely and lamentably
understan