I do not propose to dwell at any length upon the next ten or twelve

years of Herminia Barton's life. An episode or two must suffice;

and those few told briefly.

She saw nothing of her family. Relations had long been strained

between them; now they were ruptured. To the rest of the Bartons,

she was even as one dead; the sister and daughter's name was never

pronounced among them. But once, when little Dolores was about

five years old, Herminia happened to pass a church door in

Marylebone, where a red-lettered placard announced in bold type

that the Very Reverend the Dean of Dunwich would preach there on

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Sunday. It flashed across her mind that this was Sunday morning.

An overpowering desire to look on her father's face once more--she

had never seen her mother's--impelled Herminia to enter those

unwonted portals. The Dean was in the pulpit. He looked stately

and dignified in his long white hair, a noticeable man, tall and

erect to the last, like a storm-beaten pine; in spite of his

threescore years and ten, his clear-cut face shone thoughtful, and

striking, and earnest as ever. He was preaching from the text, "I

press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling." And he

preached, as he always did, eloquently. His river of speech flowed

high between banks out of sight of the multitude. There was such

perfect sincerity, such moral elevation in all he said, that

Herminia felt acutely, as she had often felt before, the close

likeness of fibre which united her to him, in spite of extreme

superficial differences of belief and action. She felt it so much

that when the sermon was over she waited at the vestry door for her

father to emerge. She couldn't let him go away without making at

least an effort to speak with him.

When the Dean came out, a gentle smile still playing upon his

intellectual face,--for he was one of the few parsons who manage in

their old age to look neither sordid nor inane,--he saw standing by

the vestry door a woman in a plain black dress, like a widow of the

people. She held by the hand a curly-haired little girl of

singularly calm and innocent expression. The woman's dark hair

waved gracefully on her high forehead, and caught his attention.

Her eyes were subtly sweet, her mouth full of pathos. She pressed

forward to speak to him; the Dean, all benignity, bent his head to

listen.

"Father!" Herminia cried, looking up at him.

The Dean started back. The woman who thus addressed him was barely

twenty-eight, she might well have been forty; grief and hard life

had made her old before her time. Her face was haggard. Beautiful

as she still was, it was the beauty of a broken heart, of a Mater

Dolorosa, not the roundfaced beauty of the fresh young girl who had

gone forth rejoicing some ten years earlier from the Deanery at

Dunwich to the lecture-rooms at Girton. For a moment the Dean

stared hard at her. Then with a burst of recognition he uttered

aghast the one word "Herminia!"




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