In fact, if this home, in which they all shared, was not exactly as they would have liked it to be, it was nevertheless a delightful place to John Sterling. He already had a sense of proprietorship in it. He lined its walls with books as he grew able, with prints, with now and then a painting, with plaster till he could get marble; Lilian's ivies clambered everywhere, and her azaleas and great lilies seemed to have a secret of perpetual flowering; a bright fire cast rosy lights and shadows over it all; and John would declare, as he sank into his easy-chair in the half twilight and surveyed the warm place, which seemed only a ruddy background for Lilian's fairness, that he never wanted anything better than this as long as he lived. It hurt him sometimes, though, to remember that Lilian never made any response to such words. "Well, well," he would say to himself in a way he had, "why should she? and why should I expect it of her? If people are born with wings, they do not want to creep. She beautifies everything she touches, and she is only in her right place when all the flower of the world's beauty is about her. But some day that shall be; and meantime there is nothing to hinder my liking this." He had almost an ideal home with Lilian's mother, as he wrote to his own mother, and every time he went out of it in the morning he felt himself a better man than he was when he went into it at night. His mother and father journeyed a thousand miles to see it, and felt as John did himself—thanked Heaven for the promise of a child like Lilian—one so forgetful of herself, so thoughtful for every one else, so candid, so generous, so gentle, so good. "She is nothing but a child," said Mrs. Sterling for the thousandth time, "and yet how lofty she is!—so lofty and so sweet! What will she be at thirty if she is this at seventeen? It makes me tremble to think of John's being blest so, as if it were too much, as if some fate must overtake him."
"He must become a very superior man under the influence of such a wife as Lilian will be," said Mr. Sterling. "Helen shall go on and spend the winter with John: they teach canaries to sing," said he, stroking Helen's black hair, "by hanging up their cages in the same room with a nightingale's."
And so Helen was despatched on the journey, and made another member in the little family, for John's friends merely had rooms, and enjoyed no more sufferance than other guests in the penetralia of the house. She was a gaunt and big-eyed child, with a certain promise of magnificence that, as Reyburn said, might be fulfilled in a year or two in a sumptuous sort of beauty. But now she was a morbid and retiring creature, fourteen or fifteen years old, looking out askance and half suspiciously on the world from under the shadow of her immense eyelashes, and singing from room to room with a strange voice that a year or two would ripen into tones fit for a siren. There was just the difference in age between her and Lilian that, while it allowed them companionship, gave Lilian, together with the fact of her engagement to John, a glorious dignity in Helen's eyes that she would not have her abate a jot. Her gowns, her shawls, her simple laces and few jewels seemed the appanage of a superior state of existence; they brought close to her the possibilities of that charmed time when she too would be a woman grown. She could not tire of gazing at the blush flitting over Lilian's face as she spoke, at the way her steady eyelid slanted toward her cheek as she read: the sound of her voice had an intimate music that acted like a charm; and when this wonderful being entertained her in her well hours and cosseted her in her ill ones, listened to her, waited on her and caressed her, Helen rewarded her by worshiping her. It was Lilian who constantly procured Helen pleasures, who shielded her little faults, who sympathized with her joys and her griefs and her sentimentalities, making merry with her to-day, crying with her to-morrow, and who shone upon her with unvarying sunshine; it was Lilian who did all this in another way for John; it was Lilian who made every one's happiness that came near her; and Helen's affection for her became something romantic and ideal. As for her brother John, Helen had always held him in a place apart: she loved him far better than she loved her strict, stern father; he was a portion of herself; her universe revolved around him; she had never formed a fancy of what life and the world would be without him; and much as she worshiped Lilian, she had more than once doubted if she were altogether worthy of John—not because she was Lilian, but because he was John. She used to watch Lilian sometimes when John's friends came in in the evening—used to watch her and admire her flushing face, her perfect toilette, her gracious manner; but used to wonder if all betrothed women treated their lovers' friends so exactly as they did their lovers, with that same unchanging courtesy and gentle sweetness. Once she saw the manner vary: it was while she herself was singing to them all, facing down the room, and John held his pawn suspended in the crisis of a game of chess, while Mr. Reyburn walked familiarly up and down, now turning the music for her, now bending with a word in Lilian's ear, now joining in the burden of the song:
As fair art thou, my bonnie lass,
So deep in luve am I;
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Till a' the seas gang dry—
Till a' the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi' the sun.
"What a being Burns was!" interrupted John, without looking up. "How precisely he knew my feelings toward any one who would show me how to escape this checkmate!" And Lilian sprang to her feet, upsetting her workbasket, and ran to him and commenced talking hurriedly, while Mr. Reyburn, whose eyes had been resting on her face for some time, kept on singing after Helen ceased—