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Mr. Vere, the father of this boy and girl, was perhaps less to be blamed than some parents, for the fact that his children did not regard him as their friend. An extreme natural reserve of character and manner had, in his case, been so augmented by the unhappy circumstances of his life, that to his children from their earliest years, he had never appeared otherwise than hard, forbidding, and utterly unsympathising. Yet in reality he was a man of deep feeling, and capable of strong and lasting attachments; but along with these healthy characteristics were to be found in him a large amount of morbid weakness on certain points, and a peculiarity which I can best describe as narrow-heartedness. The one passion of his life had been his love for his wife, a lovely, silly, mindless baby, whose early death was certainly not the bitterest disappointment she caused him. Their carried life was short, but it lasted long enough for the freezing, narrowing process to begin in the husband’s heart. He lost faith in affection, or at least in his own power of inspiring it. The want of breadth about him prevented his seeing that though he had been so unfortunate as to make the one “grand mistake,” an uncongenial marriage, it did not necessarily follow that every other relation in life was, for him, to be in like manner a failure. He made up his mind beforehand, that were he to allow himself to seek for consolation in the love of his children, in that, too, he would but be laying up fresh disappointment for himself. And therefore he was weak and cowardly enough to stifle, so far as he could, the natural outflowings of fatherly affection. He did not altogether succeed in this, for his heart was still, in spite of himself, sound at the core; but, alas, as time went on it proved no exception to that law of our nature, by which all unused members gradually contract and wither. From his children’s earliest years, as I said, Mr. Vere checked in himself all outward demonstration of affection, and this, of course, quickly reacted upon them. Little people are not slow to understand when they and their innocent caresses are unsought, if not unwelcome. Fortunately, however, for these poor little things, they had each other; and the affection of two as honest, loving little hearts as ever beat, refused vent in one direction, only flowed the more vehemently in the remaining one. And to give the father his due, he certainly was not unmindful or careless of their actual comforts and requirements. They had everything to be desired for their health and happiness, except their father’s love. As they grew older, time brought no improvement to the state of matters. Extreme strictness, not to say severity, was the basis of Mr. Vere’s theory of education. This, and the fact that he never in the slightest degrees confided in his children, or appeared to consider them as reasonable and intelligent companions, extended the already wide gulf between them. Yet he continued, solicitous about their health and comfort, and was even scrupulously careful in his choice of their teachers, books, and the few companions he thought it wise to allow them. Had any one taxed him with not fulfilling to the utmost his duties as a parent, he would have been utterly amazed and indignant; for so one-sided and warped had his whole being become through the one great mistake of his life, that it simply never entered his imagination that, by not loving his children, he was denying to them the first of their natural rights; or that his systematic coldness could possibly be to them an actual injury and injustice.