with his pencil-case over the head. Odd! girl, it _is_ sore.'

When I contrasted the refined and fluent old gentleman whom I had just
left, with this amazing specimen of young ladyhood, I grew sceptical almost
as to the possibility of her being his child.

I was to learn, however, how little she had, I won't say of his society,
but even of his presence--that she had no domestic companion of the least
pretensions to education--that she ran wild about the place--never, except
in church, so much as saw a person of that rank to which she was born--and
that the little she knew of reading and writing had been picked up, in
desultory half-hours, from a person who did not care a pin about her
manners or decorum, and perhaps rather enjoyed her grotesqueness--and that
no one who was willing to take the least trouble about her was competent
to make her a particle more refined than I saw her--the wonder ceased. We
don't know how little is heritable, and how much simply training, until we
encounter some-such spectacle as that of my poor cousin Milly.

When I lay down in my bed and reviewed the day, it seemed like a month of
wonders. Uncle Silas was always before me; the voice so silvery for an old
man--so preternaturally soft; the manners so sweet, so gentle; the aspect,
smiling, suffering, spectral. It was no longer a shadow; I had now seen
him in the flesh. But, after all, was he more than a shadow to me? When I
closed my eyes I saw him before me still, in necromantic black, ashy with a
pallor on which I looked with fear and pain, a face so dazzlingly pale,
and those hollow, fiery, awful eyes! It sometimes seemed as if the curtain
opened, and I had seen a ghost.

I had seen him; but he was still an enigma and a marvel. The living face
did not expound the past, any more than the portrait portended the future.