Yet he had a heart which, if he could find a confessor whom he could trust, he longed to ease in confidence.

For the rest, the man's physical frame, not too robust at any time, was shattered, and with it his nerve--sudden shipwreck, painful accident, the fierce alternatives of hope and fear; then at last a delirium of joy at the recovery of one whom he thought dead, had done their work with him; and in this broken state some ancient, secret superstition became dominant, and, strive as he would to suppress it, even in the presence of a stranger, had burst from his lips in hints of unsubstantial folly.
Such was the father, or such he appeared to Morris, but of the daughter what could be said?
Without doubt she was a woman of strange and impressive power.

At this very moment her sweet voice, touched with that continual note of pleading, still echoed in his brain.

And the dark, quiet eyes that now slept, and now shone large, as her thoughts fled through them, like some mysterious sky at night in which the summer lightning pulses intermittently! Who might forget those eyes that once had seen them?
Already he wished to be rid of their haunting and could not.

Then her beauty--how unusual it was, yet how rich and satisfying to the eye and sense; in some ways almost Eastern notwithstanding her Norse blood! Often Morris had read or heard of the bewildering power of women, which for his part hitherto he had been inclined to attribute to shallow and very common causes, such as underlie all animate nature.