ing for a moment of laying aside that
fine blush which she brought into the room, and which is her pretty
symbol of youth, and modesty, and beauty.

He took a little slim white hand and laid it down on his brown palm,
where it looked all the whiter: he cleared the grizzled mustachio from
his mouth, and stooping down he kissed the little white hand with a
great deal of grace and dignity. There was no point of resemblance, and
yet a something in the girl's look, voice, and movements, which caused
his heart to thrill, and an image out of the past to rise up and salute
him. The eyes which had brightened his youth (and which he saw in his
dreams and thoughts for faithful years afterwards, as though they looked
at him out of heaven) seemed to shine upon him after five-and-thirty
years. He remembered such a fair bending neck and clustering hair, such
a light foot and airy figure, such a slim hand lying in his own--and now
parted from it with a gap of ten thousand long days between. It is an
old saying, that we forget nothing; as people in fever begin suddenly to
talk the language of their infancy we are stricken by memory sometimes,
and old affections rush back on us as vivid as in the time when they
were our daily talk, when their presence gladdened our eyes, when their
accents thrilled in our ears, when with passionate tears and grief we
flung ourselves upon their hopeless corpses. Parting is death, at least
as far as life is concerned. A passion comes to an end; it is carried
off in a coffin, or weeping in a post-chaise; it drops out of life one
way or other, and the earthclods close over it, and we see it no more.
But it has been part of our souls, and it is eternal. Does a mother
not love her dead infant? a man his lost mistress? with the fond wife
nestling at his side,--yes, with twenty children smiling round her knee.
No doubt, as the old soldier held the girl's hand in his, the little
talisman led him back to Hades, and he saw Leonora.----

"How do you do, uncle?" say girls Nos. 2 and 3 in a pretty little
infantile chorus. He drops the talisman, he is back in common life
again--the dancing baby in the arms of the bobbing nurse babbles a
welcome. Alfred looks up for a while at his uncle in the white trousers,
and then instantly proposes that Clive should make him some drawings;
and is on his knees at the next moment. He is always climbing on
somebody or something, or winding over chairs, curling through
banisters, stan