illiancy of which those who knew aught of his
mind began already to foretell. But he mixed little, if at all, with the
gayer occupants of the world's prominent places. Absorbed alternately in
his studies and his labours of good, the halls of pleasure were seldom
visited by his presence; and they who in the crowd knew nothing of
him but his name, and the lofty bearing of his mien, recoiled from the
coldness of his exterior; and, while they marvelled at his retirement
and reserve, saw in both but the moroseness of the student and the gloom
of the misanthropist.

But the nobleness of his person; the antiquity of his birth; his wealth,
his unblemished character, and the interest thrown over his name by
the reputation of talent and the unpenetrated mystery of his life, all
powerfully spoke in his favour to those of the gentler sex, who judge us
not only from what we are to others, but from what they imagine we
can be to them. From such allurements, however, as from all else, the
mourner turned only the more deeply to cherish the memory of the dead;
and it was a touching and holy sight to mark the mingled excess of
melancholy and fondness with which he watched over that treasure in
whose young beauty and guileless heart his departed Isabel had yet left
the resemblance of her features and her love. There seemed between them
to exist even a dearer and closer tie than that of daughter and sire;
for, in both, the objects which usually divide the affections of the man
or the child had but a feeble charm: Isabel's mind had expanded beyond
her years, and Algernon's had outgrown his time; so that neither the
sports natural to her age, nor the ambition ordinary to his, were
sufficient to wean or to distract the unity of their love. When, after
absence, his well-known step trod lightly in the hall, her ear, which
had listened and longed and thirsted for the sound, taught her fairy
feet to be the first to welcome his return; and when the slightest
breath of sickness menaced her slender frame, it was his hand that
smoothed her pillow, and his smile that cheered away her pain; and when
she sank into sleep she knew that a father's heart watched over her
through the long but untiring night; that a father's eye would be the
first which, on waking, she would meet.

"Oh! beautiful, and rare as beautiful," was that affection; in the
parent no earthlier or harder sternness in authority, nor weakness in
doting, nor caprice in love; in the child