but, only ask yourself, how could my happiness be perfect, while

yours was incomplete?”

“If I had never seen Charles, my father, I should have been

quite happy with you.”

He smiled at her unconscious admission that she would have

been unhappy without Charles, having seen him; and replied:

“My child, you did see him, and it is Charles. If it had not been

Charles, it would have been another. Or, if it had been no other, I

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should have been the cause, and then the dark part of my life

would have cast its shadow beyond myself, and would have fallen

on you.”

It was the first time, except at the trial, of her ever hearing him

refer to the period of his suffering. It gave her a strange and new

sensation while his words were in her ears; and she remembered it

long afterwards.

“See!” said the Doctor of Beauvais, raising his hand towards

the moon. “I have looked at her, from my prison-window, when I

could not bear her light. I have looked at her when it has been

such torture to me to think of her shining upon what I had lost,

that I have beaten my head against my prison-walls. I have looked

at her, in a state so dull and lethargic, that I have thought of

nothing but the number of horizontal lines I could draw across her

at the full, and the number of perpendicular lines with which I

could intersect them.” He added in his inward and pondering

manner, as he looked at the moon, “It was twenty either way, I

remember, and the twentieth was difficult to squeeze in.”

The strange thrill with which she heard him go back to that

time, deepened as he dwelt upon it; but, there was nothing to

shock her in the manner of his reference. He only seemed to

contrast his present cheerfulness and felicity with the dire

endurance that was over.

“I have looked at her, speculating thousands of times upon the

unborn child from whom I had been rent. Whether it was alive.

Whether it had been born alive, or the poor mother’s shock had

killed it. Whether it was a son who would some day avenge his

father. (There was a time in my imprisonment, when my desire for

vengeance was unbearable.) Whether it was a son who would

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never know his father’s story; who might even live to weigh the

possibility of his father’s having disappeared of his own will and

act. Whether it was a daughter who would grow to be a woman.”

She drew closer to him, and kissed his cheek and his hand.

“I have pictured my daughter, to myself, as perfectly forgetful

of merather, altogether ignorant of me, and unconscious of me. I

have cast up the years of her age, year after year. I have seen her

married to a man who knew nothing of my fate. I have altogether

perished from the remembrance of the living, and in the next

generation my place was a blank.”

“My father! Even to hear that you had such thoughts of a