of Lilian, I forgot Sir W. Hamilton, and believed in phrenology. As iron
girders and pillars expand and contract with the mere variations of
temperature, so will the strongest conviction on which the human intellect
rests its judgment vary with the changes of the human heart; and the
building is only safe where these variations are foreseen and allowed for
by a wisdom intent on self-knowledge.[2]

There was much in the affection that had sprung up between Julius Faber
and Amy Lloyd which touched my heart and softened all its emotions. This
man, unblessed, like myself, by conjugal and parental ties, had, in his
solitary age, turned for solace to the love of a child, as I, in the pride
of manhood, had turned to the love of woman. But his love was without
fear, without jealousy, without trouble. My sunshine came to me in a
fitful ray, through clouds that had gathered over my noon; his sunshine
covered all his landscape, hallowed and hallowing by the calm of declining
day.

And Amy was no common child. She had no exuberant imagination; she was
haunted by no whispers from Afar; she was a creature fitted for the
earth,--to accept its duties and to gladden its cares. Her tender
observation, fine and tranquil, was alive to all the important household
trifles by which, at the earliest age, man's allotted soother asserts her
privilege to tend and to comfort. It was pleasant to see her moving so
noiselessly through the rooms I had devoted to her venerable protector,
knowing all his simple wants, and providing for them as if by the
mechanism of a heart exquisitely moulded to the loving uses of life.
Sometimes when I saw her setting his chair by the window (knowing, as I
did, how much he habitually loved to be near the light) and smoothing his
papers (in which he was apt to be unmethodical), placing the mark in his
book when he ceased to read, divining, almost without his glance, some