She slid slowly down out of his grasp, never speaking, but bearing in her eyes the awful look of horror that became frozen there forever. The second picture might have been taken then, though it was not painted till long afterward. She never thenceforth, while her father lived, left the wing of the manor-house in which her rooms lay; neither did he, nor any one else, except the two servants who attended her, look upon her face. People pitied her very much at first, and then forgot her entirely. Once the superior of a Belgian convent, a relation of the family, offered to admit Mabel, if she chose to take the vows. Perhaps Sir Ewes Tresilyan was more gratified than he liked to show, for the best blood in Europe was to be found in that sisterhood; but his reply was not a gracious one: "I thank the abbess," he wrote; "but _we_ are used to choose for our gifts the most precious thing we have--not the most worthless. I will not lighten my house from a heavy burden, by offering it to God." He relented, however, when he was dying, and sent for his daughter. Very reluctantly she came. He had prepared, I believe, a pompous and proper oration, wherein he was to pardon her and even bestow a sort of qualified blessing; but the wan face and wild, hollow eyes, not seen for twelve years, frightened all his grandeur out of his head; and the obstinate, narrow-minded tyrant collapsed all at once into a foolish, fond old man. Something too late (that's one comfort) to avail him much. In Mabel's nature, soft and yielding as it appeared, there was the black spot that nothing but harshness and cruelty could have brought out--the utter incapacity of relenting, which had given rise to the rude rhyme known through three counties-- In Tresilyan's face Fault finds no grace. So, when the sick man cried out to her, through his sobs, to kiss him and forgive him, the dreary, monotonous voice only answered, "I can kiss you, father;" and when she had laid her icicles of lips on his forehead, she glided out of the room like a ghost that has accomplished its mission and hastens away to its own place. Sir Ewes never tried to call her back; he scarcely spoke at all intelligibly after that; but lay, for the few remaining hours of life, moaning to himself, his face turned to the wall.