yet--it was singular--she saw ghosts. Mr. Radcliffe did not
obviously resemble his mother, nor did Kate, and yet across both of
them there often shot clear, and at times even flashing gleams,
indisputable evidence that in son and granddaughter she still lived.
It was in his relationship to his daughter that Mr. Radcliffe
betrayed his mother's blood. His reading, as we have said, was in
Horace, Montaigne, and Swift, but if Kate went away for no longer
than a couple of days to her cousins at Penrith, he used to watch
her departure till she was hidden at the first bend of the road
about half a mile distant, and then when he went back to his room
and looked at her empty chair, a half-mad, unconquerable melancholy
overcame him. It was not to be explained by anxiety. It was
inexplicable, a revelation of something in him dark and terrible.
In 1844 Kate Radcliffe was twenty-four years old. She had never
been handsome, and when she was sixteen her pony had missed its
footing on a treacherous mountain track and she narrowly escaped
with her life. She was thrown on a rock, and her forehead was
crossed henceforth beyond remedy with a long broad mark. She had
never cared much for company, and her disfigurement made her care
for it less. She could not help feeling that everybody noticed it,
and most people in truth noticed nothing else. She was 'the girl
with a scar.' As time went on, this self-consciousness, or rather
consciousness of herself as the scar, diminished, but her
indifference remained, other reasons for it being added. She never
had a lover; and, indeed, what man could be expected to take to
himself as wife even the wisest and most affectionate of women whose
brow was indented? She was advised to wear some kind of head-gear
which would hide her misfortune, but she refused. 'Everybody,' she
said, 'would know what was behind, and I will not be harassed by
concealment.' To her father her accident did but the more endear