t
I wish for one minute to think that you are at home again under this
roof?"

Helen cast down her eyes, and seemed troubled; then she raised them,
with a soft angelic candour in their dovelike blue, and, as if in
shelter from all thoughts of more warm affection, again murmured
"brother," and did as he asked her.

So there she sat, amongst the dull books, by his table, near the open
window, her fair hair parted on her forehead, looking so good, so calm,
so happy! Leonard wondered at his own self-command. His heart yearned to
her with such inexpressible love, his lips so longed to murmur, "Ah,
as now so could it be forever! Is the home too mean?" But that word
"brother" was as a talisman between her and him. Yet she looked so at
home--perhaps so at home she felt!--more certainly than she had yet
learned to do in that stiff stately house in which she was soon to have
a daughter's rights. Was she suddenly made aware of this, that she so
suddenly arose, and with a look of alarm and distress on her face.

"But--we are keeping Lady Lansmere too long," she said falteringly. "We
must go now," and she hastily took up her shawl and bonnet.

Just then Mrs. Fairfield entered with the visitors, and began making
excuses for inattention to Miss Digby, whose identity with Leonard's
child-angel she had not yet learned.

Helen received these apologies with her usual sweetness. "Nay," she
said, "your son and I are such old friends, how could you stand on
ceremony with me?"

"Old friends!" Mrs. Fairfield stared amazed, and then surveyed the
fair speaker more curiously than she had yet done. "Pretty, nice-spoken
thing," thought the widow; "as nice-spoken as Miss Violante, and
humbler-looking like,--though, as to dress, I never see anything so
elegant out of a picter."

Helen now appropriated Mrs. Riccabocca's arm; and, after a kind
leave-taking with the widow, the ladies returned towards Riccabocca's
house.

Mrs. Fairfield, however, ran after them with Leonard's hat and gloves,
which he had forgotten.

"'Deed, boy," she said, kindly, yet scoldingly, "but there'd be no more
fine books, if the Lord had not fixed your head on your shoulders. You
would not think it, marm," she added to Mrs. Riccabocca, "but sin' he
has left you, he's not the 'cute lad he was; very helpless at times,
marm!"

Helen could not resist turning round, and looking at Leonard, with a sly
smile.

The widow saw the smile, and catching Leonard by the arm, w