“But Helen,” said Hope, in a low alarmed voice, as she pressed close to her friend’s side. “Helen, is that true? People say it in books, and ministers say it. It is in the Bible I heard one say, but _I_ never saw it in the Bible, Helen.” “Saw what?” “What the minister said--what you were saying, Helen--that the world is very miserable, that everybody must be unhappy. Helen, you are old, you know better than me; but I think it is not true.” The electric touch was given; there needed no more; bravely upon the rising tide the distempered thoughts went out, not to return again until their time. The tears went back to their fountain--the face brightened with its varying, fluttering colour--the dark mood was gone. “Did I say so, Hope? did you think I said so? No, no, it is not true!” said Helen, the words coming quick and low, in her rapid revulsion of feeling; “there is sorrow and there is joy, as there are darkness and light; but the night is good as well as the day, and it is blessed to live--blessed to have all the changes God sends to us--good and evil--the sweet and the bitter--blessed and not miserable, Hope.” The clouds were hovering over the blank hill far away in golden masses, rounded with the soft advancing gloom of night, and overhead was the peaceful sky, pure and pale in the stillness of its rest. “Sometimes we have storms, Hope,” said the repentant Helen, “and sometimes it is dark--dark--you do not know how dark it grows sometimes; but the sun rises every morning, and every night--look up yonder, how quiet the sky is--do you think the world could be miserable, Hope, so long as there is the sky and the sun?” Hope looked up wistfully but did not speak, for she could not quite understand yet, either the melancholy itself or the sudden change; but she hung upon Helen’s arm in her affectionate girlish way, and they stood together in silence watching how the colours faded one by one, till the hill in the west grew only a great dark shadow, and parting into long pale misty streaks, the clouds lay motionless upon the calm, cold heaven. There is a long stretch of wet sand yonder where the broad Firth ought to be, and something chill and disconsolate, speaking of early winter, is in that gusty inconsistent breeze, which already carries past them a yellow leaf or two, dead so soon; but Helen Buchanan, wayward and inconsistent too, has bright life in her eyes, and sees nothing sad in all she looks upon. Within herself has risen this wilful, strong, capricious light proper to her nature--a nature strangely formed, as God builds not as man does--with every delicate line and shadowy curve, belonging separately to the gentle weak, conspiring to perfect it as strong.