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 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 sate, 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 for ever! 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 visiters, 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. "'Deed, boy," she said 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!"