“Bring me that basket, Sophy,” said the old Doctor, “if you can find it.”

Sophy brought it to him,—­for he had not yet entered Elsie’s apartment.

“These purple leaves are from the white ash,” he said.  “You don’t know the notion that people commonly have about that tree, Sophy?”

“I know they say the Ugly Things never go where the white ash grows,” Sophy answered.  “Oh, Doctor dear, what I’m thinkin’ of a’n’t true, is it?”

The Doctor smiled sadly, but did not answer.  He went directly to Elsie’s room.  Nobody would have known by his manner that he saw any special change in his patient.  He spoke with her as usual, made some slight alteration in his prescriptions, and left the room with a kind, cheerful look.  He met her father on the stairs.

“Is it as I thought?” said Dudley Venner.

“There is everything to fear,” the Doctor said, “and not much, I am afraid, to hope.  Does not her face recall to you one that you remember, as never before?”

“Yes,” her father answered,—­“oh, yes!  What is the meaning of this change which has come over her features, and her voice, her temper, her whole being?  Tell me, oh, tell me, what is it?  Can it be that the curse is passing away, and my daughter is to be restored to me,—­such as her mother would have had her,—­such as her mother was?”

“Walk out with me into the garden,” the Doctor said, “and I will tell you all I know and all I think about this great mystery of Elsie’s life.”

They walked out together, and the Doctor began:—­

“She has lived a twofold being, as it were,—­the consequence of the blight which fell upon her in the dim period before consciousness.  You can see what she might have been but for this.  You know that for these eighteen years her whole existence has taken its character from that influence which we need not name.  But you will remember that few of the lower forms of life last as human beings do; and thus it might have been hoped and trusted with some show of reason, as I have always suspected you hoped and trusted, perhaps more confidently than myself, that the lower nature which had become ingrafted on the higher would die out and leave the real woman’s life she inherited to outlive this accidental principle which had so poisoned her childhood and youth.  I believe it is so dying out; but I am afraid,—­yes, I must say it, I fear it has involved the centres of life in its own decay.  There is hardly any pulse at Elsie’s wrist; no stimulants seem to rouse her; and it looks as if life were slowly retreating inwards, so that by-and-by she will sleep as those who lie down in the cold and never wake.”