For
once the darling of old age actually more than responded in full to
its tenderness. In the isolation of his life there had been little
demand for sympathy on the part of those anywhere near his own age.
So much the larger was the fund of superfluous affection which went
forth, with a delicacy not less than their own, to meet the
sympathies of the aged people who cherished him. In him, their old,
almost forgotten sorrows bled anew.
[24] Variety of affection, in a household in which many relations had
lived together, had brought variety of sorrow. But they were well-
nigh healed now--those once so poignant griefs--the scars remaining
only as deeper lines of natural expression. It was visible, to their
surprise, that he penetrated the motive of the mass said so solemnly,
in violet, on the Innocents' Day, and understood why they wept at the
triumphant antiphons:--"My soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare
of the fowler!"--thinking intently of the little tombs which had
recorded carefully almost the minutes of children's lives, Elizabeth
de Latour, Cornelius de Latour, aged so many years, days, hours.
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