"Ah, Heaven be thanked," cried Leonard. "Helen is saved; she will not die;" and he burst into tears. A very few moments, and a very few words sufficed to explain to Harley the state of his old fellow-soldier's orphan. And Harley himself soon stood in the young sufferer's room, supporting her burning temples on his breast, and whispering into ears that heard him, as in a happy dream, "Comfort, comfort; your father yet lives in me." And then Helen, raising her eyes, said, "But Leonard is my brother--more than brother--and he needs a father's care more than I do." "Hush, hush, Helen. I need no one--nothing now!" cried Leonard; and his tears gushed over the little hand that clasped his own. CHAPTER XVIII. Harley L'Estrange was a man whom all things that belong to the romantic and poetic side of our human life deeply impressed. When he came to learn the ties between these two children of nature, standing side by side, alone amidst the storms of fate, his heart was more deeply moved than it had been for many years. In those dreary attics, overshadowed by the smoke and reek of the humble suburb--the workday world in its harshest and tritest forms below and around them--he recognized that divine poem which comes out from all union between the mind and the heart. Here, on the rough deal table (the ink scarcely dry), lay the writings of the young wrestler for fame and bread; there, on the other side the partition, on that mean pallet, lay the boy's sole comforter--the all that warmed his heart with living mortal affection. On one side the wall, the world of imagination; on the other this world of grief and of love. And in both, a spirit equally sublime--unselfish Devotion--"the something afar from the sphere of our sorrow." He looked round the room into which he had followed Leonard, on quitting Helen's bedside. He noted the MSS. on the table, and, pointing to them, said gently, "And these are the labors by which you supported the soldier's orphan?--soldier yourself, in a hard battle!" "The battle was lost--I could not support her," replied Leonard, mournfully. "But you did not desert her. When Pandora's box was opened, they say Hope lingered last--" "False, false," said Leonard; "a heathen's notion. There are deities that linger behind Hope: Gratitude, Love, and Duty." "Yours is no common nature," exclaimed Harley, admiringly, "but I must sound it more deeply hereafter; at present I hasten for the physician; I shall return with him. We must move that poor child from this low, close air as soon as possible. Meanwhile, let me qualify your rejection of the old fable. Wherever Gratitude, Love, and Duty remain to man, believe me that Hope is there too, though she may be oft invisible, hidden behind the sheltering wings of the nobler deities." Harley said this with that wondrous smile of his, which cast a brightness over the whole room--and went away.