Chapter 14

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
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