s. She looked at him a moment, and, sliding in
through the open window and through the study, sought her own apartment,
where she locked herself in, and began to sob and moan like those that
weep. But the gracious solace of tears seemed to be denied her, and her
grief, like her anger, was a dull ache, longing, like that, to finish
itself with a fierce paroxysm, but wanting its natural outlet.

This seemingly trifling incident of the death of her favorite appeared
to change all the current of her thought. Whether it were the sight
of the dying bird, or the thought that her own agency might have been
concerned in it, or some deeper grief, which took this occasion to
declare itself,--some dark remorse or hopeless longing,--whatever it
might be, there was an unwonted tumult in her soul. To whom should
she go in her vague misery? Only to Him who knows all His creatures'
sorrows, and listens to the faintest human cry. She knelt, as she had
been taught to kneel from her childhood, and tried to pray. But her
thoughts refused to flow in the language of supplication. She could not
plead for herself as other women plead in their hours of anguish. She
rose like one who should stoop to drink, and find dust in the place of
water. Partly from restlessness, partly from an attraction she hardly
avowed to herself, she followed her usual habit and strolled listlessly
along to the school.

* * * * *

Of course everybody at the Institute was full of the terrible adventure
of the preceding evening. Mr. Bernard felt poorly enough; but he had
made it a point to show himself the next morning, as if nothing had
happened. Helen Darley knew nothing of it all until she had risen, when
the gossipy matron of the establishment made her acquainted with all its
details, embellished with such additional ornamental appendages as it
had caught up in transmission from lip to lip. She did not love to
betray her sensibilities, but she was pale and tremulous and very nearly
tearful when Mr. Bernard entered the sitting-room, showing on his
features traces of the violent shock he had received and the heavy
slumber from which he had risen with throbbing brows. What the poor
girl's impulse was, on seeing him, we need not inquire too curiously. If
he had been her own brother, she would have kissed him and cried on
his neck; but something held her back. There is no galvanism in
kiss-your-brother; it is copper against copper: but alie