II.

----"with burnished neck of verdant gold, erect
Amid his circling spires, that on the grass
Floated redundant,--she busied heard the sound
Of rustling leaves, but minded not, _at first_."--_Milton._

Helen recovered, and the agitation caused by her sickness having
subsided, everything went on apparently as it did before. While she was
sick, Mrs. Gleason resolved that she would keep her as much as possible
from Miss Thusa's influence, and endeavor to counteract it by a closer,
more confiding union with herself. But every one knows how quickly the
resolutions, formed in the hour of danger, are forgotten in the moment
of safety--and how difficult it is to break through daily habits of
life. Even when the pulse beats high with health, and the heart glows
with conscious energy, it is difficult. How much more so, when the whole
head is sick, and the whole spirit is faint--when the lightest duty
becomes a burden, and _rest_, nothing but _rest_, is the prayer of the
weary soul!

The only perceptible change in the family arrangements was, that Miss
Thusa carried her wheel at night into the nursery, and installed herself
there as the guardian of Helen's slumbers. The little somnambulist, as
she was supposed to be, required a watch, and when Miss Thusa offered to
sit by the fire-side till the family retired to rest, Mrs. Gleason could
not be so ungrateful as to refuse, though she ventured to reiterate the
warning, breathed by the feverish couch of her child. This warning Miss
Thusa endeavored to bear in mind, and illumined the gloomy grandeur of
her legends by some lambent rays of fancy--but they were lightning
flashes playing about ruins, suggesting ideas of desolation and decay.

Let it not be supposed that Helen's life was all shadow. Oh, no! In
proportion as she shuddered at darkness, and trembled before the
spectres her own imagination created, she rejoiced in sunshine, and
revelled in the bright glories of creation. She was all darkness or all
light. There was no twilight about her. Never had a child a more
exquisite perception of the beautiful, and as at night she delineated to
herself the most awful and appalling images that imagination can
conceive, by day she beheld forms more lovely than ever visited the
poet's dream. She could see angels cradled on the glowing bosom of the
sunset clouds, angels braiding the rainbow of the sky. Light to her was
peopled with angels, as darkness with phantoms.