"He is dead," said Mrs. Dayton. "Both father and mother are dead."
"I was an orphan, too," continued Mrs. Van Dorn. "And I had no near relatives. It is a sorrowful lot."
"Helen has had good friends, relatives."
"That's a comfort. I heard, we all did, that you were one of the best speakers at the closing of school. It was in the paper."
"Oh, was it?" Helen's eyes glowed with gratification.
"Yes. So Mrs. Dayton suggested you might be as good as some grown-up body. That was Robert Browning's poem you recited."
"It is a splendid poem," cried Helen enthusiastically. "You can see it all; the squadron—what was left of it after the battle—and the 'brief and bitter debate,' and the order to blow up the vessels on the beach. And then Hervé Riel, just a sailor, stepping out and making his daring proposal, and going 'safe through shoal and rock!' Oh, how the captain must have stood breathless! And the English coming too late! I'm glad someone put it in stirring verse."
Helen paused with a scarlet face. She never talked this way to anyone except Mr. Warfield.
"Yes," said Mrs. Van Dorn, "I have seen the man who wrote it, talked with him and his lovely wife, who wrote verses quite as beautiful. I think you like stirring poems," in a half inquiry.
"Yes, I do," she replied tremulously, and in her girlish enthusiasm she thought she could have fallen down at the feet of the man who wrote Hervé Riel. She never had thought of his being an actual living man.