ng that the place must have painful
thoughts connected with their dead brother for his father and uncle,
continued to talk to Valentine, and did not address either of them: and
whatever they may have felt they did not say a word; but Valentine
presently observed the bed of lilies, and he and John moved on together,
the two fathers following.

They outwalked their fathers, and Valentine, stooping over the bed,
gathered two or three of the lovely flowers.

"The poor old grandmother!" he observed. "Miss Melcombe told me she
loved to watch this bed of lilies, and said only a few days ago, that
she could wish they might never be disturbed."

He turned--both the old men stood stock still behind him, looking down
on the lily-bed. Valentine repeated what Miss Melcombe had told him. "So
no doubt, papa, you'll give orders that it shall not be touched, as you
are going to have all the place put in order."

"Yes, yes, certainly my boy--certainly he will," said Uncle Augustus,
answering for his brother.

Valentine was not gifted with at all more feeling or sentiment than
usually falls to the lot of a youth of his age, but a sort of
compunction visited him at that moment to think how soon they all, alive
and well, had invaded the poor old woman's locked and guarded sanctuary!
He stooped to gather another lily, and offered the flowers to his
father. Old Daniel looked at the lilies, but his unready hand did not
move forward to take them; in fact, it seemed that he slightly shrank
back. With an instantaneous flash of surprise Valentine felt rather than
thought, "If you were dead, father, I would not decline to touch what
you had loved." But in the meantime his uncle had put forth a hand and
received them. "And yet," thought Valentine, "I know father must have
felt that old lady's death. Why, when he was in the mourning-coach he
actually cried." And so thinking, as he walked back to the garden-door
with John Mortimer, he paused to let John pass first; and chancing to
turn his head for one instant, he saw his uncle stoop and jerk those
lilies under a clump of lilac bushes, where they were hidden. Before
either of the old men had noticed that he had turned, Valentine was
walking with his cousin outside, but an uneasy sensation of surprise and
suspicion haunted him. He could not listen to John Mortimer's talk, and
when, the rest of the party had gone back to the house, he lingered
behind, returned to the garden, and, stooping down for