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 any thing 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 toward Riccabocca's house.
Mrs. Fairfield, however, ran after them with Leonard's hat and gloves, which he had forgotten.
"'Deed, boy," said she, kindly, yet scoldingly, "but there'd be no more fine books, if the Lord had not fixed your head on your shoulders. You would not think it, marm," she added to Mrs. Riccabocca, "but sin' he has left you, he's not the 'cute lad he was; very helpless at times, marm!"
Helen could not resist turning round, and looking at Leonard, with a sly smile.
The widow saw the smile, and catching Leonard by the arm, whispered, "But, where before have you seen that pretty young lady? Old friends!"