g child had
been no sham. There, at least, there was nothing to suspect, nothing
to sneer at. The calm purity, self-sacrifice, hope, which was
contained in it, had softened his world-hardened spirit, and woke up
in him feelings which were always pleasant, feelings which the sight
of his father, or the writing to his father, could only awaken.
Quaintly enough, the thought of Grace and of his father seemed
intertwined, inextricable. If the old man had but such a nurse as she!
And for a moment he felt a glow of tenderness toward her, because he
thought she would be tender to his father. She had stolen his money,
certainly; or if not, she knew where it was, and would not tell him.
Well, what matter just then? He did not want the money at that minute.
How much pleasanter and wiser to take things as they came, and enjoy
himself while he could; and fancy that she was always what he had seen
her that day. After all, it was much more pleasant to trust people
than to suspect them: "Handsome is who handsome does! And besides, she
did me the kindness of saving my life; so it would but be civil to
talk to her a little."

He began to talk to her about the lovely scene around; and found, to
his surprise, that she saw as much of it as he, and saw a great deal
more in it than he. Her answers were short, modest, faltering; but
each one of them suggestive; and Tom soon found that he had met with
a mind which contained all the elements of poetry, and needed only
education to develop them.

"What a blue stocking, pre-Raphaelite seventh-heavenarian she would
have been, if she had had the misfortune to be born in that station of
life!" But where a clever man is talking to a beautiful woman, talk he
will, and must, for the mere sake of showing off, though she be but
a village schoolmistress; and Tom soon found himself, with a secret
sneer at his own vanity, displaying before her all the much finer
things that he had seen in his travels; and as he talked, she
answered, with quiet expressions of wonder, sympathy, regret at her
own narrow sphere of experience, till, as if the truth was not enough,
he found himself running to the very edge of exaggeration, and a
little over it, in the enjoyment of calling out her passion for the
marvellous, especially when called out in honour of himself.

And she, simple creature, drank it all in as sparkling wine, and only
dreaded lest the stream should cease. Adventures with noble savages
in palm-fringed co