you weeping, my sweet child? That must not be; your young life
must take no darkness from mine. Even should Lady Belamour's arbitrary
caprice bear you off without another meeting, remember that you have
given me many more happy hours than I ever supposed to be in store for
me, and have opened doors which shall not be closed again."

"You will get some one to recite to you?" entreated Aurelia, her voice
most unsteady.

"Godfrey shall seek out some poor scholar or exhausted poetaster, with a
proviso that he never inflicts his own pieces on me," said Mr. Belamour,
in a tone more as if he wished to console her than as it were a pleasing
prospect. "Never fear, gentle monitress, I will not sink into the
stagnation from which your voice awoke me. Neither Godfrey nor my nephew
would allow it. Come, let us put it from our minds. It has always
been my experience, that whatever I expected from my much admired
sister-in-law, that was the exact reverse of what she actually did.
Therefore let us attend to topics, though I wager that you have no fresh
acquisitions for me to-day."

"I am ashamed, sir, but I could not fix my mind even to a most frightful
description of wolves in Mr. Thomson's 'Winter.'"

"That were scarcely a soothing subject; but we might find calm in
something less agitating and more familiar. Perhaps you can recall
something too firmly imprinted on your memory to be disturbed by these
emotions."

Aurelia bethought herself that she must not disappoint her friend on
what might prove their last evening; she began very unsteadily:--

"' Hence, loathed Melancholy.'"

However by the time "Jonson's learned sock" was on, her mechanical
repetition had become animated, and she had restored herself to
equanimity. When the clock struck nine, her auditor added his thanks,
"In case we should not meet again thus, let me beg of my kind visitor to
wear this ring in memory of one to whom she has brought a breath indeed
from L'Allegro itself. It will not be too large. It was made for a
lady."

And amid her tearful thanks she felt a light kiss on her fingers,
revealing to her that the hermit must possess a beard, a fact, which
in the close-shaven Hanoverian days, conveyed a sense of squalor and
neglect almost amounting to horror.

In her own room she dropped many a tear over the ring, which was of
course the Cupid intaglio, and she spent the night in strange mixed
dreams and yearnings, divided between he