same low tone,
"And his mother--Nora's sister--shrank from seeing me! That is the
reason why I wished you not to call. She has not told the young man
why she shrank from seeing me; nor have I explained it to him as yet.
Perhaps I never shall."

"Indeed, dearest Harley," said the countess, with great gentleness,
"I wish you too much to forget the folly--well, I will not say that
word--the sorrows of your boyhood, not to hope that you will rather
strive against such painful memories than renew them by unnecessary
confidence to any one; least of all to the relation of--"

"Enough! don't name her; the very name pains me. And as to confidence,
there are but two persons in the world to whom I ever bare the old
wounds,--yourself and Egerton. Let this pass. Ha!--a ring at the
bell--that is he!"

CHAPTER XI.

Leonard entered on the scene, and joined the party in the garden. The
countess, perhaps to please her son, was more than civil,--she was
markedly kind to him. She noticed him more attentively than she had
hitherto done; and, with all her prejudices of birth, was struck to find
the son of Mark Fairfield the carpenter so thoroughly the gentleman. He
might not have the exact tone and phrase by which Convention stereotypes
those born and schooled in a certain world; but the aristocrats of
Nature can dispense with such trite minutia? And Leonard had lived,
of late at least, in the best society that exists for the polish of
language and the refinement of manners,--the society in which the most
graceful ideas are clothed in the most graceful forms; the society which
really, though indirectly, gives the law to courts; the society of
the most classic authors, in the various ages in which literature has
flowered forth from civilization. And if there was something in the
exquisite sweetness of Leonard's voice, look, and manner, which the
countess acknowledged to attain that perfection in high breeding, which,
under the name of "suavity," steals its way into the heart, so her
interest in him was aroused by a certain subdued melancholy which
is rarely without distinction, and never without charm. He and Helen
exchanged but few words. There was but one occasion in which they could
have spoken apart, and Helen herself contrived to elude it. His face
brightened at Lady Lansmere's cordial invitation, and he glanced at
Helen as he accepted it; but her eye did not meet his own.

"And now," said Harley, whistling to Nero, whom his