Attention soon teaches this:  the one grows and expands beautifully with the slightest attention; the other is a fat soil, and will run to weeds, without constant, close, and deep cultivation, and its production of good fruit is in exact proportion with its fertility and care.  It gives the most trouble but it yields the greatest product.  And here in that warm, impulsive heart is the fat soil.  O! for the hand to weed away all that is noxious now rooting there.  That look, that whispered bitterness was the fruit of wicked wrong—­I know it; the very nature prompting there would give the sweetest return to justice, kindness, and love.

CHAPTER XXII.

THE ROMANCE CONTINUED.

FATHER CONFESSOR—­OPEN CONFESSION—­THE UNREAD WILL—­OLD TONEY’S NARRATIVE—­SQUIRREL SHOOTING—­THE FAREWELL UNSAID—­BROTHERS-IN-LAW—­ FAREWELL INDEED.

When the morrow came, the clouds were weeping and the damp was dripping from every leaf, and gloomy rifts of spongy vapor floated lazily upon the breeze, promising a wet and very unpleasant day.  These misty periods rarely endure many hours in the autumn, but sometimes they continue for days.  The atmosphere seems half water, and its warm damp compels close-housing, to avoid the clammy, sickly feeling met beyond the portals.  At such times, time hangs heavily, and every resource sometimes fails to dispel the gloom and ennui consequent upon the weather; conversation will pall; music cease to delight, and reading weary.  To stand and watch the rain through the window-panes, to lounge from the drawing-room to your chamber, to drum with your fingers upon the table—­to beat your brain for a thought which you vainly seek to weave into rhyme in praise of your inamorata—­all is unavailing.  The rain is slow but ceaseless, and the hours are days to the unemployed mind.  We hum a tune and whistle to hurry time, but the indicating fingers of the tediously ticking clock seems stationary, and time waits for fair weather.  The ladies love their chambers, and sleeping away the laggard hours, do not feel the oppression of a slow, continuous, lazy rain.

The morning has well-nigh passed, and the drawing-room is still untenanted.  The judge was busy in his office, looking over papers and accounts, seemingly unconscious of the murky day; perhaps he had purposely left this work for such a day—­wise judge—­a solitary man, unloving, and unloved; hospitable by freaks, sordid by habit, and mean by nature.  Yet he was wise in his way; devoid of sentiment or sympathy as a grind-stone, his wit was as sharp as his heart was cold.  Absorbed in himself, the outside world was nothing to him.  He had work, gainful work for all weathers, and therefore no feeling for those who suffered from the weather or the world, if it cost him nothing in pence.  He was the guardian of his baby sister; but all of her he had in his heart was a care that she should not marry, before he was ready to settle her estate.  The interest he felt in her, was his commissions for administering her property with a legitimate gain earned in the use of her money.