ctions, owe even to our own past errors; and if we learned nothing by
the errors of others, we should be dull indeed. We must know where the
roads divide, and have marked where they lead to, before we can erect
our sign-post; and books are the sign-posts in human life."

"Books! and I have not yet read yours. And Lord L'Estrange tells me you
are famous now. Yet you remember me still,--the poor orphan child, whom
you first saw weeping at her father's grave, and with whom you burdened
your own young life, over-burdened already. No, still call me Helen--you
must always be to me a brother! Lord L'Estrange feels that; he said so
to me when he told me that we were to meet again. He is so generous, so
noble. Brother!" cried Helen, suddenly, and extending her hand, with
a sweet but sublime look in her gentle face,--"brother, we will never
forfeit his esteem; we will both do our best to repay him! Will we
not?--say so!"

Leonard felt overpowered by contending and unanalyzed emotions. Touched
almost to tears by the affectionate address, thrilled by the hand
that pressed his own, and yet with a vague fear, a consciousness that
something more than the words themselves was implied,--something that
checked all hope. And this word "brother," once so precious and so dear,
why did he shrink from it now; why could he not too say the sweet word
"sister"?

"She is above me now and evermore!" he thought mournfully; and the tones
of his voice, when he spoke again, were changed. The appeal to renewed
intimacy but made him more distant, and to that appeal itself he made no
direct answer; for Mrs. Riccabocca, now turning round, and pointing to
the cottage which came in view, with its picturesque gable-ends, cried
out,

"But is that your house, Leonard? I never saw anything so pretty."

"You do not remember it then," said Leonard to Helen, in accents of
melancholy reproach,--"there where I saw you last? I doubted whether
to keep it exactly as it was, and I said, '--No! the association is
not changed because we try to surround it with whatever beauty we can
create; the dearer the association, the more the Beautiful becomes to it
natural.' Perhaps you don't understand this,--perhaps it is only we poor
poets who do."

"I understand it," said Helen, gently. She looked wistfully at the
cottage.

"So changed! I have so often pictured it to myself, never, never like
this; yet I loved it, commonplace as it was to my recollection; and the
garret