Never before had
his hand failed to alight, sure as a lark on its nest, upon the
brass handle of the door that admitted him to his paradise. It
missed it now, and fell on something damp, and rough, and repellent
instead. Horrible, but true suspicion! While he was at school that
day, his grandmother, moved by what doubt or by what certainty she
never revealed, had had the doorway walled up. He felt the place
all over. It was to his hands the living tomb of his mother's vicar
on earth.
He returned to his book, pale as death, but said never a word. The
next day the stones were plastered over.
Thus the door of bliss vanished from the earth. And neither the boy
nor his grandmother ever said that it had been.
PART II.--HIS YOUTH.
CHAPTER I.
ROBERT KNOCKS--AND THE DOOR IS NOT OPENED.
The remainder of that winter was dreary indeed. Every time Robert
went up the stair to his garret, he passed the door of a tomb. With
that gray mortar Mary St. John was walled up, like the nun he had
read of in the Marmion she had lent him. He might have rung the
bell at the street door, and been admitted into the temple of his
goddess, but a certain vague terror of his grannie, combined with
equally vague qualms of conscience for having deceived her, and the
approach in the far distance of a ghastly suspicion that violins,
pianos, moonlight, and lovely women were distasteful to the
over-ruling Fate, and obnoxious to the vengeance stored in the gray
cloud of his providence, drove him from the awful entrance of the
temple of his Isis.
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