And here Agnes pursued her vocation, making very little demonstration of it, the main pillar for the mean time, and crowning glory of her father’s house. Her own mind and imagination had been profoundly impressed, almost in spite of herself, by that last known act of Lionel’s--his hasty journey to London with Doctor Serrano. It was the kind of act beyond all others to win upon a temperament so generous and sensitive, which a more ostentatious generosity might have disgusted and repelled; and perhaps the very uncertainty in which they remained concerning him kept up the lurking “interest” in Agnes Atheling’s heart. It was possible that he might appear any day at their very doors; it was possible that he never might be seen again. It was not easy to avoid speculating upon him--what he was thinking, where he was?--and when, in that spontaneous delight of her young genius, which yet had suffered no diminution, Agnes’s thoughts glided into impersonation, and fairy figures gathered round her, and one by one her fables grew, in the midst of the thread of story--in the midst of what people called, to the young author’s amusement, “an elaborate development of character, the result of great study and observation”--thoughts came to her mind, and words to her lip, which she supposed no one could thoroughly understand save _one_. Almost unconsciously she shadowed his circumstances and his story in many a bright imagination of her own; and contrasted with the real one half-a-dozen imaginary Lionels, yet always ending in finding him the noblest type of action in that great crisis of his career. It blended somehow strangely with all that was most serious in her work; for when Agnes had to speak of faith, she spoke of it with the fervour with which one addresses an individual, opening her heart to show the One great Name enshrined in it to another, who, woe for him, in his wanderings so sadly friendless, knew not that Lord. So the voice of the woman who dwelt at home went out over the world; it charmed multitudes who thought of nothing but the story it told, delighted some more who recognised that sweet faulty grace of youth, that generous young directness and simplicity which made the fable truth. If it ever reached to one who felt himself addressed in it, who knew the words, the allusions, that noble craft of genius, which, addressing all, had still a private voice for one--if there was such a man somewhere, in the desert or among the mountains far away, wandering where he seldom heard the tongue of his country, and never saw a face he recognised, Agnes never knew.