’Tis but a peevish boy;--yet he talks well:-- But what care I for words? yet words do well, When he that speaks them pleases those that hear. It is a pretty youth;--not very pretty:-- But, sure, he’s proud; and yet his pride becomes him. Shakspere. When Helen Grahame opened her eyes, after a somewhat protracted sleep, she looked around her for a minute in unutterable surprise. The morning previously, she had awakened in an agony of sorrow, it is true, but to look upon all the luxurious refinements and comforts which are to be met with in the sleeping chambers of the wealthy alone. Now she beheld herself in a small sitting-room; the bed appointments being evidently supplemental, and not fitly pertaining to the room. Clean they were, but vastly inferior in material and pattern to what she had been accustomed. A fire was burning clearly in the small grate, and a kettle, steaming and singing cheerfully, stood upon the hob. Upon a table, at the foot of the bed, was spread the breakfast appurtenances; and at the window sat a young girl plying her needle with a rapidity and skill something magical in its character. A moment more, and Helen Grahame realised her position. She remembered her terrible conversation with Mrs. Truebody, her nurse, the latter’s charge, and her own fearful conviction of its truth. She remembered the sleepless horrors of that dreadful night; the simulated sleep at dawn, the absence of the nurse, the hasty dressing, the scribbled note, the slinking glide down the servants’ staircase, the swift dash into the garden, and the rapid exit--as it happened, unseen--by the private entrance. She had a confused recollection of streets crowded with throngs of people, of the roar of carriages, the bewildering turmoil of active daily business life, and then faint and weak, of a long, long, dreamy rest upon a seat in an open park, of wild schemes for the future floating through her brain, without the power to reduce them to practicability, of a sinking foreboding sense of helplessness, a startling perception that she must starve and die. And she shivered, and her teeth chattered as she remembered the grim water--remembered how, like a magnet, it drew her towards it; how it wooed her with a low dirge, the burden of which was that Hugh was there; how it offered her eternal repose, and stilled its surface so that calmness and peace seemed alone to be found within its placid bosom. Then she remembered the small voice that rose up and made a claim on life; the agonized struggle that followed; the sudden interposition of a stranger; the deep voice of Lester Vane, being saved from his loathly arms; and on, on, incident by incident, until her eyes and thoughts rested upon the face of the young fair girl who sat at the window, her eyes bent fixedly upon her work, and her hand swiftly and unceasingly moving to and fro.