But along with these feelings and thoughts, of mingled good and bad, came one feeling which he needed more than any—repentance. Seated alone upon a fallen tree one day, the face of poor Harry came back to him, as he saw it first, poring over Polexander in the library; and, full of the joy of life himself, notwithstanding his past troubles, strong as a sunrise, and hopeful as a Prometheus, the quivering perplexity of that sickly little face smote him with a pang. “What might I not have done for the boy! He, too, was in the hands of the enchantress, and, instead of freeing him, I became her slave to enchain him further.” Yet, even in this, he did Euphra injustice; for he had come to the conclusion that she had laid her plans with the intention of keeping the boy a dwarf, by giving him only food for babes, and not good food either, withholding from him every stimulus to mental digestion and consequent hunger; and that she had objects of her own in doing so—one perhaps, to keep herself necessary to the boy as she was to the father, and so secure the future. But poor Euphra’s own nature and true education had been sadly neglected. A fine knowledge of music and Italian, and the development of a sensuous sympathy with nature, could hardly be called education. It was not certainly such a development of her own nature as would enable her to sympathise with the necessities of a boy’s nature. Perhaps the worst that could justly be said of her behaviour to Harry was, that, with a strong inclination to despotism, and some feeling of loneliness, she had exercised the one upon him in order to alleviate the other in herself. Upon him, therefore, she expended a certain, or rather an uncertain kind of affection, which, if it might have been more fittingly spent upon a lapdog, and was worth but little, might yet have become worth everything, had she been moderately good. Hugh did not see Euphra again for more than a fortnight. CHAPTER XXX. CHANGES. Hey, and the rue grows bonny wi’ thyme! And the thyme it is withered, and rue is in prime. Refrain of an old Scotch song, altered by BURNS. He hath wronged me; indeed he hath;—at a word, he hath;—believe me; Robert Shallow, Esquire, saith he is wronged. Merry Wives of Windsor.