Therefore he was able to be almost like a mother to her. He taught
her to look upon the world with his own pure, untroubled eyes. It
became the better part of his aim in life to hedge her around and
protect her fragile and delicate nature from all the soilures and
perturbations which make the world so perplexing, so difficult, and
so dangerous an abiding-place.

When they stood together on the hill beside the Parsonage, gazing
forth over the surging sea, he would say: "Look, Rebecca! yonder is
an image of life--of that life in which the children of this world
are tossed to and fro; in which impure passions rock the frail
skiff about, to litter the shore at last with its shattered
fragments. He only can defy the storm who builds strong bulwarks
around a pure heart--at his feet the waves break powerlessly."

Rebecca clung to her father; she felt so safe by his side. There
was such a radiance over all he said, that when she thought of the
future she seemed to see the path before her bathed in light. For
all her questions he had an answer; nothing was too lofty for him,
nothing too lowly. They exchanged ideas without the least
constraint, almost like brother and sister.

And yet one point remained dark between them. On all other matters
she would question her father directly; here she had to go
indirectly to work, to get round something which she could never
get over.

She knew her father's great sorrow; she knew what happiness he had
enjoyed and lost. She followed with the warmest sympathy the