with which he regarded me in the first month or two after my brother's
death. If it had not been for the softening influence of my compassion
for him--the first deep compassion I had ever felt--I should have been
stung by the perception that my father transferred the inheritance of an
eldest son to me with a mortified sense that fate had compelled him to
the unwelcome course of caring for me as an important being. It was only
in spite of himself that he began to think of me with anxious regard.
There is hardly any neglected child for whom death has made vacant a more
favoured place, who will not understand what I mean.

Gradually, however, my new deference to his wishes, the effect of that
patience which was born of my pity for him, won upon his affection, and
he began to please himself with the endeavour to make me fill any
brother's place as fully as my feebler personality would admit. I saw
that the prospect which by and by presented itself of my becoming
Bertha's husband was welcome to him, and he even contemplated in my case
what he had not intended in my brother's--that his son and daughter-in-
law should make one household with him. My softened feelings towards my
father made this the happiest time I had known since childhood;--these
last months in which I retained the delicious illusion of loving Bertha,
of longing and doubting and hoping that she might love me. She behaved
with a certain new consciousness and distance towards me after my
brother's death; and I too was under a double constraint--that of
delicacy towards my brother's memory and of anxiety as to the impression
my abrupt words had left on her mind. But the additional screen this
mutual reserve erected between us only brought me more completely under
her power: no matter how empty the adytum, so that the veil be thick
enough. So absolute is our soul's need of something hidden and uncertain
for the maintenance of that doubt and hope and effort which are the
breath of its life, that if the whole future were laid bare to us beyond