productive of more earnest affection than can exist between two
persons, one of whom is protective, but unrelated. But there are wild,
forcible, unrestricted characters, on whom the necessity and even duty
of loving their own child is a sort of barrier to love. They perhaps do
not love their own traits, which they recognize in their children; they
shrink from their own features in the reflection presented by these
little mirrors. A certain strangeness and unlikeness (such as gives
poignancy to the love between the sexes) would excite a livelier
affection. Be this as it may, it is not probable that Doctor Grimshawe
would have loved a child of his own blood, with the coarse
characteristics that he knew both in his race and himself, with nearly
such fervor as this beautiful, slender, yet strenuous, intelligent,
refined boy,--with such a high-bred air, handling common things with so
refined a touch, yet grasping them so firmly; throwing a natural grace
on all he did. Was he not his father,--he that took this fair blossom
out of the sordid mud in which he must soon have withered and perished?
Was not this beautiful strangeness, which he so wondered at, the result
of his care?

And little Elsie? did the grim Doctor love her as well? Perhaps not,
for, in the first place, there was a natural tie, though not the
nearest, between her and Doctor Grimshawe, which made him feel that she
was cast upon his love: a burden which he acknowledged himself bound to
undertake. Then, too, there were unutterably painful reminiscences and
thoughts, that made him gasp for breath, that turned his blood sour,
that tormented his dreams with nightmares and hellish phantoms; all of
which were connected with this innocent and happy child; so that,
cheerful and pleasant as she was, there was to the grim Doctor a little
fiend playing about his floor and throwing a lurid light on the wall,
as the shadow of this sun-flickering child. It is certain that there