HELEN.—"Not Miss Digby; sister, if you like."
LEONARD (evading the word that implied so forbidden an affinity).— "Helen, will you grant me a favour? Your eyes and your smile say 'yes.' Will you lay aside, for one minute, your shawl and bonnet? What! can you be surprised that I ask it? Can you not understand that I wish for one minute to think that you are at home again under this roof?"
Helen cast down her eyes, and seemed troubled; then she raised them, with a soft angelic candour in their dovelike blue, and, as if in shelter from all thoughts of more warm affection, again murmured "brother," and did as he asked her.
So there she sat, amongst the dull books, by his table, near the open window, her fair hair parted on her forehead, looking so good, so calm, so happy! Leonard wondered at his own self-command. His heart yearned to her with such inexpressible love, his lips so longed to murmur, "Ah, as now so could it be forever! Is the home too mean?" But that word "brother" was as a talisman between her and him. Yet she looked so at home—perhaps so at home she felt!—-more certainly than she had yet learned to do in that stiff stately house in which she was soon to have a daughter's rights. Was she suddenly made aware of this, that she so suddenly arose, and with a look of alarm and distress on her face.
"But—we are keeping Lady Lansmere too long," she said falteringly. "We must go now," and she hastily took up her shawl and bonnet.
Just then Mrs. Fairfield entered with the visitors, and began making excuses for inattention to Miss Digby, whose identity with Leonard's child-angel she had not yet learned.
Helen received these apologies with her usual sweetness. "Nay," she said, "your son and I are such old friends, how could you stand on ceremony with me?"
"Old friends!" Mrs. Fairfield stared amazed, and then surveyed the fair speaker more curiously than she had yet done. "Pretty, nice-spoken thing," thought the widow; "as nice-spoken as Miss Violante, and humbler- looking like,—though, as to dress, I never see anything so elegant out of a picter."
Helen now appropriated Mrs. Riccabocca's arm; and, after a kind leave- taking with the widow, the ladies returned towards Riccabocca's house.
Mrs. Fairfield, however, ran after them with Leonard's hat and gloves, which he had forgotten.