Page:What Will He Do With It? - Routledge - Volume 1.djvu/190

 which the ray of the candle left in shade. The girl raised her eyes slowly towards the window,—towards the glimpse of the blue sky, and the slanting lustre of the moon. There is a certain epoch in our childhood, when what is called the romance of sentiment first makes itself vaguely felt. And ever with the dawn of that sentiment the moon and the stars take a strange and haunting fascination. Few persons in middle life-even though they be genuine poets—feel the peculiar spell in the severe stillness and mournful splendour of starry skies which impresses most of us, even though no poets at all, in that mystic age when Childhood nearly touches upon Youth, and turns an unquiet heart to those marvellous riddles within us and without, which we cease to conjecture when experience has taught us that they have no solution upon this side the grave. Lured by the light, the child rose softly, approached the window, and, resting her upturned face upon both hands, gazed long into the heavens, communing evidently with herself, for her lips moved and murmured indistinctly. Slowly she retired from the casement, and again seated herself at the foot of the bed, disconsolate. And then her thoughts ran somewhat thus, though she might not have shaped them exactly in the same words: "No, I cannot understand it. Why was I contented and happy before I knew him? Why did I see no harm, no shame in this way of life—not even on that stage with those people—until he said, 'It was what he wished I had never stooped to'? And Grandfather says our paths are so different they cannot cross each other again. There is a path of life, then, which I can never enter; there is a path on which I must always, always walk, always, always, always that path,—no escape! Never to come into that other one where there is no disguise, no hiding, no false names,—never, never!" she started impatiently, and with a wild look,—"It is killing me!"

Then, terrified by her own impetuosity, she threw herself on the bed, weeping low. Her heart had now gone back to her grandfather; it was smiting her for ingratitude to him. Could there be shame or wrong in what he asked,—what he did? And was she to murmur if she aided him to exist? What was the opinion of a stranger boy compared to the approving sheltering love of her sole guardian and tried fostering friend? And could people choose their own callings and modes of life? If one road went this way, another that, and they on the one road were borne farther