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."