My girls are as good as girls can be, but who can know a man as his wife knows him ?" Then his memory would conjure up a tuft of brown hair and a single white, thin hand over a coverlet, and he would feel, as we have all felt, that if we do not live and know each other after death, then indeed we are tricked and betrayed by all the highest hopes and subtlest intuitions of our nature.
The Doctor had his compensations to make up for his loss.

The great scales of Fate had been held on a level for him; for where in all great London could one find two sweeter girls, more loving, more intelligent, and more sympathetic than Clara and Ida Walker?
So bright were they, so quick, so interested in all which interested him, that if it were possible for a man to be compensated for the loss of a good wife then Balthazar Walker might claim to be so.
Clara was tall and thin and supple, with a graceful, womanly figure.
There was something stately and distinguished in her carriage, "queenly" her friends called her, while her critics described her as reserved and distant.
Such as it was, however, it was part and parcel of herself, for she was, and had always from her childhood been, different from any one around her.

There was nothing gregarious in her nature.

She thought with her own mind, saw with her own eyes, acted from her own impulse.

Her face was pale, striking rather than pretty, but with two great dark eyes, so earnestly questioning, so quick in their transitions from joy to pathos, so swift in their comment upon every word and deed around her, that those eyes alone were to many more attractive than all the beauty of her younger sister.