Yet, strange to say, Caleb found that God’s countenance continued to be averted from his own. He was still licking the soreness of his disappointment over the Exhibition fireworks when one morning in the prime of June his eldest daughter left the great gloomy house on the hill, never to return. While Caleb stormed at his wife for not taking better precautions to keep Caterina in bounds, he was aware that he might as well be storming at a marble statue. He lacked the imagination to understand that the soul of Letizia had fled from its imprisonment in the guise of Caterina’s lissom body. But he did apprehend, however dimly, that henceforth nothing he might say or do would ever again affect his wife either for good or for ill. Cold dark eyes beneath black arched brows surveyed him contemptuously. He had never yet actually struck Letizia; but he came near to striking her at that moment. “She wanted to go on the stage.” “A play-actress! My eldest daughter a play-actress!” “Alas, neither she nor I can cup those drops of blood she owes to you. But her soul is hers and mine. You had no part in making that. Even if you did crawl over my body and eat the heart out of me, you slug! Do what you like with the others. Make what you can of them. But Caterina is mine. Caterina is free.” “As if I had not suffered enough this year,” Caleb groaned. “Suffered? Did you say that you had suffered?” His wife laughed. “And what about the sufferings of my Caterina all these years of her youth?” “I pray she’ll starve to death,” he went on. “She was starving to death in this house.” “Ay, I suppose that’s what the Church folk will be saying next. The idle, good-for-nothing slanderers! Not content with accusing me of starving my cows, they’ll be accusing me of starving my children now. But the dear Lord knows....” “You poor dull fool,” Letizia broke in, and with one more glance from her cold dark eyes she left him. Caterina had as dissolute a career as her father could have feared and as miserable an end as he could have hoped, for about twelve years later, after glittering with conspicuous shamelessness amid the tawdry gilt of the Second Empire, she died in a Paris asylum prematurely exhausted by drink and dissipation. “Better to die from without than from within,” said her mother when the news was brought to Brigham. “What do you mean by that?” Caleb asked in exasperated perplexity. “It’s all these French novels you read that makes you talk that high-flown trash. You talk for the sake of talking, that’s my opinion. You used to talk like a fool when I first married you, but I taught you at last to keep your tongue still. Now you’ve begun to talk again.” “One changes in thirty-four years, Caleb. Even you have changed. You were mean and ugly then. But you are much meaner and much uglier now. However, you have the consolation of seeing your son Joshua keep pace with you in meanness and in ugliness.”