Waterbury evening Democrat., 1891-04-02

In keeping It rom the1r possession De- cause of that personal prejudice which your mother instilled into your mind when you were mere half-grown boy?" | He knit his brows. ''What is this?" he demanded harshly. "Who told you of any such act on my mothers part? Thorndyke, no doubt"
 'I have guessed more than Dr. Thorn dyke told me-" Lucia said.
 Sylvan chose now to rise. He walked toward the door, slipping both hands behind him with sort of fnon-committal moroseness-as who should say: "I de- cline further speech on this affair, though what I have heard has been highly aggravating."
 He left the dining-room, and Lucia felt that for the first time they had stood on the verge of an open quarrel. And how would it end? She must have that packet; her very palms had begun to itch and jingle for it. With burning cheeks and lowered head she sat for more than an hour in her own dressing room, and brooded upon this avid long . ing which had seemed to grow as firmly wed to her spirit as it's color to her blood. No use to try and laugh away Egbert Maynard's whole aspiration as the dream of a mad chemist. While she now thought upon her own past life she understood how there had always been strain in it of romantic receptivi- ty to just such impressions as the one which recent event had wrought. Her parents had held no definite faith; they were of the kind (eminently though her father had shone in the law) who cur tained what they thought the 'bad policy" of non-belief with such pretty
 patterned fabric of indifference, that it deceived nearly every eye as orthodoxy. For this reason their child's nature missed those pleasant repasts which occur to us when we can feed imagina- tion and emotion on the solemnity of worship. Lucia would have made a splendidnun, except for the actual greed of mere living, the hunger after large inclusive experiences, the love for life itself just because of it's pulse-beats and breath-drawings, which must for ever have kept her somewhat of the earth, earthly.
 But she would have clung to her psalter and her beads, nevertheless, while shaping for herself a material future heaven, with palm-trees of glos- sier emerald than most nuns dream of, and perhaps a pair of wings with some sort of half-voluptuous rose-tint amid the chastity of their plumes. Now, in the present circumstances of her being, married to & man who had never lit her days with any hardier kind of glow than that of a rushlight through hours when her eyes longed for the
 s'light that never was." this young woman poured forth in excited obei- sance on a new-found object of homage all the past, pent-up fervor which re- ligion might formerly have won from her with ease. Seated there, in her
 perturbation, her fright of self, she
 strove to think what friend or acquaint-
 ance could now bring balm to her troubled soul. Not one! All the men and women whom she knew had for years entrenched themselves behind the practical and ordinary. Some of them
 were confirmed church-goers; others
 were rationalists; and yet others we're
 of that ''don't care' type which accepts life, death, time, eternity and the ku- .. man soul as if they were facts in his- tory, like the Edict of Nantes or the Battle of the Boyne-topics that one : may we'll be aware of but need not seri-
 ously treat.
 q wonder what sort of counsellor , this younger brother, Gerald, world malze," Lucia deliberated. He's never
 sent us his photograph; I might hat ve
 gained some real inkling of him from that. But at least he's liberal; Ir Thorndyke more than suggested it. His , mind isn't a covert of cobwebs, like Sylvan's. It would be refreshing tc know him and judge for myself whetSe1 he could help me-" Through mist o1
 tragic bewilderment one clear-vieweC
 purpose began to dawn upon her Sylvan had spoken about destroying those papers. This meant that he baC not yet done so-possibly that he woult refrain from such an act for long
 time, if indeed he ever performed it Meanwhile the manuscript (why notf reposed in one of the two locked drawer
 of the cabinet in his study. What if sh' |, antagonized his obduraey by theft : Her impulse of honesty, still entwine' among the most sensitive fibers of COD .. science itself, urged a stern vet z against any such crafty course. Ono 7. more she would try persuasion. One
 more she did.
 For several days the friends wh . came to her noticed that she had an ab l. sent and febrile manner. One or tw 5 of them, who were feminine, wen away with the deduction that a pecul T. iarly domestic illness was approach
 ing and that it was high time som D happy proof of her bond with Sylvan Q should bring it's welcome change.
 One lady even murmured a sentenc ' of this import in Lucias ear. "Hoy IS little she dreams of what thralls an T clouds me-" her nearer thought. Tha
 very evening, perhaps an hour afte '- their almost silent dinner together, sh appeared at Sylvan's side, while h
 wrote as our lawyers do when the s have quilted their downtown" di: fractions, and while he used for a des o the very cabinet whose two locke u drawers made so heavy an onus on he