But it was not quite so easy to answer why. “Because I shall promise if you will tell me the reason,” said the sensible Hope. But Helen could give no reason; so she bit her lip and looked half angry, and laughed. “Do you know, Hope, I begin to think you are to be very clever,” she said at last. “Miss Swinton says I am sensible,” said Hope, steadily; “and when you have no reason, why should you be angry?--but mind, you are to get your fortune out of a book; and now I must go away.” The farewell was said, and Hope gone; but Helen still stood leaning over the garden-gate, looking after her with an embarrassed smile upon her face. It was a sunny morning, though the haze of the beginning frost was still in the air; the morning always brought new hopes and a buoyant upspringing to the elastic nature of Helen Buchanan, and she felt more than usually light-hearted to-day. As was her habit, she revealed this in every unconscious movement. Mrs Buchanan knew by the very measure of her step as she reëntered the house, that there was no mist in her sunny atmosphere--no cloud upon her sky. A certain shy pleasure hovered upon her face, prompting her to laugh at sundry times with embarrassed uncertain gladness, and swaying about the colour in her cheek, as a mist is swayed by the wind. It did not seem certainly that Hope Oswald had much offended her. But it was not that; neither was it the evident pleasure which the young minister, who thought himself good-looking, found in Mrs Buchanan’s humble parlour, nor yet the friendship of Lilias Maxwell. The bright nature did indeed in its own warm alembic combine all these together, and draw from them a certain exhilaration; but itself in the involuntary elasticity which was its best inheritance was the source of its own happiness. A rare and precious gift, chequered as it was with the infinite variety of shadows, and all the depths of sudden depression which calmer spirits could not know. But it was very true that the Reverend Robert Insches had called very many times of late on Mrs Buchanan, and that Helen talked to him as she would have talked to any indifferent acquaintance, in her own varied wayward fashion, and that the young minister seemed exceedingly glad to respond; whereupon Mrs Buchanan, in spite of her great favour for William Oswald, began to perceive more clearly the obstacles which stood between Helen and him, and to grow more indignant at his father. His father, the harsh, stern man whose rigid strength had done so much injury to her gentle husband, and who now cast his severe shadow over the lot of her daughter. And William had been long in possession of the field; it pleased the good mother to see it entered by another competitor, and if ordinary signs held good, a competitor the Reverend Robert Insches was beginning to be.