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216 'I now held in my mind's hand the clew; my brother. But I did not immediately follow it further up. Sufficient to me in my loneliness was the knowledge, that I now knew where my father's family was to be found. As yet not the slightest intention of ever disclosing myself to them, had entered my mind. And assured as I was, that for obvious reasons, none of his surviving relatives could possibly know me, even if they saw me, for what I really was, I felt entire security in the event of encountering any of them by chance. But my unavoidable displacements and migrations from one house to another, at last brought me within twelve miles of Saddle Meadows. I began to feel an increasing longing in me; but side by side with it, a new-born and competing pride,—yes, pride, Pierre. Do my eyes flash? They belie me, if they do not. But it is no common pride, Pierre; for what has Isabel to be proud of in this world? It is the pride of—of—a too, too longing, loving heart, Pierre—the pride of lasting suffering and grief, my brother! Yes, I conquered the great longing with the still more powerful pride, Pierre; and so I would not now be here, in this room,—nor wouldst thou ever have received any line from me; nor, in all worldly probability, ever so much as heard of her who is called Isabel Banford, had it not been for my hearing that at Walter Ulver's, only three miles from the mansion of Saddle Meadows, poor Bell would find people kind enough to give her wages for her work. Feel my hand, my brother.'

'Dear divine girl, my own exalted Isabel!' cried Pierre, catching the offered hand with ungovernable emotion, 'how most unbeseeming, that this strange hardness, and this still stranger littleness, should be united in any human hand. But hard and small, it by an opposite analogy hints of the soft capacious heart that made the hand so hard with heavenly submission to thy most undeserved and martyred lot. Would, Isabel, that