and pledged
to you her faith, I should, in your place, rest perfectly satisfied that
whatever be the cloud that now rests on her imagination, and for the
time obscures the idea of yourself, it will pass away."

Faber was a believer in the main divisions of phrenology, though he did
not accept all the dogmas of Gall and Spurzheim; while, to my mind,
the refutation of phrenology in its fundamental propositions had been
triumphantly established by the lucid arguments of Sir W. Hamilton.(1)
But when Faber rested on phrenological observations assurances in honour
of Lilian, I forgot Sir W. Hamilton, and believed in phrenology. As
iron girders and pillars expand and contract with the mere variations
of temperature, so will the strongest conviction on which the human
intellect rests its judgment vary with the changes of the human heart;
and the building is only safe where these variations are foreseen and
allowed for by a wisdom intent on self-knowledge.(2)

There was much in the affection that had sprung up between Julius Faber
and Amy Lloyd which touched my heart and softened all its emotions. This
man, unblessed, like myself, by conjugal and parental ties, had, in his
solitary age, turned for solace to the love of a child, as I, in the
pride of manhood, had turned to the love of woman. But his love was
without fear, without jealousy, without trouble. My sunshine came to
me in a fitful ray, through clouds that had gathered over my noon; his
sunshine covered all his landscape, hallowed and hallowing by the calm
of declining day.

And Amy was no common child. She had no exuberant imagination; she was
haunted by no whispers from Afar; she was a creature fitted for the
earth,--to accept its duties and to gladden its cares. Her tender
observation, fine and tranquil, was alive to all the important household
trifles by which, at the earliest age, man's allotted soother asserts
her privilege to tend and to comfort. It was pleasant to see her
moving so noiselessly through the rooms I had devoted to her venerable
protector, knowing all his simple wants, and providing for them as if by
the mechanism of a heart exquisitely moulded to the loving uses of life.
Sometimes when I saw her setting his chair by the window (knowing, as
I did, how much he habitually loved to be near the light) and smoothing
his papers (in which he was apt to be unmethodical), placing the mark
in his book when he ceased to read, divining, almost without his glan