alk of it!"

LEONARD.--"Why not, Mother? What has become of her; where is she?"

MRS. FAIRFIELD (bursting into a paroxysm of tears).--"In her grave,--in
her cold grave! Dead, dead!"

Leonard was inexpressibly grieved and shocked. It is the attribute of
the poet to seem always living, always a friend. Leonard felt as if some
one very dear had been suddenly torn from his heart. He tried to console
his mother; but her emotion was contagious, and he wept with her.

"And how long has she been dead?" he asked at last, in mournful accents.

"Many's the long year, many; but," added Mrs. Fairfield, rising, and
putting her tremulous hand on Leonard's shoulder, "you'll just never
talk to me about her; I can't bear it, it breaks my heart. I can bear
better to talk of Mark; come downstairs,--come."

"May I not keep these verses, Mother? Do let me."

"Well, well, those bits o' paper be all she left behind her,--yes, keep
them, but put back Mark's. Are they all here,--sure?" And the widow,
though she could not read her husband's verses, looked jealously at the
manuscripts written in his irregular, large scrawl, and, smoothing them
carefully, replaced them in the trunk, and resettled over them some
sprigs of lavender, which Leonard had unwittingly disturbed.

"But," said Leonard, as his eye again rested on the beautiful
handwriting of his lost aunt,--"but you called her Nora--I see she signs
herself L."

"Leonora was her name. I said she was my Lady's god-child. We call her
Nora for short--"

"Leonora--and I am Leonard--is that how I came by the name?"

"Yes, yes; do hold your tongue, boy," sobbed poor Mrs. Fairfield;
and she could not be soothed nor coaxed into continuing or renewing a
subject which was evidently associated with insupportable pain.

CHAPTER X.

It is difficult to exaggerate the effect that this discovery produced
on Leonard's train of thought. Some one belonging to his own humble race
had, then, preceded him in his struggling flight towards the loftier
regions of Intelligence and Desire. It was like the mariner amidst
unknown seas, who finds carved upon some desert isle a familiar
household name.

And this creature of genius and of sorrow-whose existence he had only
learned by her song, and whose death created, in the simple heart of
her sister, so passionate a grief, after the lapse of so many
years--supplied to the romance awaking in his young heart the ideal
which it unconsciously sought. He