in a happy dream,
"Comfort, comfort; your father yet lives in me."

And then Helen, raising her eyes, said, "But Leonard is my brother--more
than brother-and he needs a father's care more than I do."

"Hush, hush, Helen. I need no one, nothing now!" cried Leonard, and his
tears gushed over the little hand that clasped his own.

CHAPTER XVIII.

Harley L'Estrange was a man whom all things that belong to the romantic
and poetic side of our human life deeply impressed. When he came to
learn the ties between these two Children of Nature, standing side by
side, alone amidst the storms of fate, his heart was more deeply moved
than it had been for many years. In those dreary attics, overshadowed
by the smoke and reek of the humble suburb, the workday world in its
harshest and tritest forms below and around them, he recognized that
divine poem which comes out from all union between the mind and the
heart. Here, on the rough deal table (the ink scarcely dry), lay the
writings of the young wrestler for fame and bread; there, on the
other side of the partition, on that mean pallet, lay the boy's sole
comforter, the all that warmed his heart with living mortal affection.
On one side the wall, the world of imagination; on the other, this world
of grief and of love. And in both, a spirit equally sublime,--unselfish
devotion,--"the something afar from the sphere of our sorrow."

He looked round the room into which he had followed Leonard, on quitting
Helen's bedside. He noted the manuscripts on the table, and pointing to
them, said gently, "And these are the labours by which you supported the
soldier's orphan?--soldier yourself in a hard battle!"

"The battle was lost,--I could not support her," replied Leonard,
mournfully.

"But you did not desert her. When Pandora's box was opened, they say
Hope lingered last--"

"False, false," said Leonard; "a heathen's notion. There are deities
that linger behind Hope,--Gratitude, Love, and Duty."

"Yours is no common nature," exclaimed Harley, admiringly, "but I must
sound it more deeply hereafter: at present I hasten for the physician; I
shall return with him. We must move that poor child from this low close
air as soon as possible. Meanwhile, let me qualify your rejection of the
old fable. Wherever Gratitude, Love, and Duty remain to man, believe me
that Hope is there too, though she may be often invisible, hidden behind
the sheltering wings of the nobler deities."

Harley sa