helen manningtree and mrs. chisholm pursued their customary mode of life at knockholt park after, as before, the departure of sir laurence. helen missed the grave and courteous gentleman whom she had learned to like so much, and her at first distant association with whom had grown into intimacy and confidence. sir laurence was a most agreeable companion; well-informed; and entirely without any sort of pretension. he had seen a great deal of the world--in the geographical sense of the term, as well as in every other; and his anecdotes of travel and descriptions of foreign lands had unflagging interest for helen, whose experience had indeed been narrow, but whose reading had been various and extensive. in the thoughtful mood into which alsager had fallen--in the serious frame of mind which had become almost habitual with him now--he would probably have been voted a bore by "society," supposing that he had placed himself within reach of its suffrages; but helen knew nothing of the tastes and fashions of the great world, and to her laurence was all that was most companionable and pleasant. he was not indeed so gifted, so cultivated a creature as cuthbert farleigh; but then,--who was? who could be expected to be? and helen, whose circle of acquaintance included a dozen unmarried men at the most, believed with perfect good faith that she had exercised the soundest judgment and discretion in her selection of the reverend cuthbert, from "all the world," as the individual to whom alone she could render unqualified respect and intrust the happiness of her future life. that resolution, before mentioned, by which the curate had bound himself, to himself, to wait until he should be a bishop, or for the occurrence of any other equally improbable event, was rather in the way of helen's happiness, either present or future; but she was not much disquieted by the delay. cuthbert had seen no symptoms of an alarming nature to indicate any "intentions" on colonel alsager's part prior to sir peregrine's death, and he was ignorant of the existence of the old baronet's letter, in which he had urged a marriage with helen upon sir laurence. he had begun to think, within a very few days of colonel alsager's arrival at knockholt, that he had been foolishly apprehensive in the first instance. was it at all likely that, at colonel alsager's age, and in his position, with his opportunities of seeing, and recommending himself to, the fairest and most fascinating women in the world, he should be entirely heart-free and ready to fix his affections upon his father's ward? of course cuthbert was quite aware that laurence alsager could never by any possibility have met any one half so worthy of admiration and of love as helen manningtree; but he was a young man of candid mind, and ready to acknowledge that a man might be preoccupied to the extent of being unable to recognize the unapproachable excellence of helen without being guilty of absolute stupidity or unpardonable bad taste. so, on the whole, these young people were tolerably comfortable in their minds, and felt an equable though unexpressed confidence in their mutual affection and in the future. the circumstance of sir peregrine alsager's will making no mention of helen--in fact, having been made before she became his ward, and during lady alsager's lifetime--had taken them both by surprise, and affected them differently. helen had always known that her own very moderate income--which sir peregrine had always supplemented by a liberal allowance--was all that she actually possessed, or had any positive right to expect. but she had never entertained any doubt that her guardian intended to leave her a handsome provision, and she experienced a considerable shock when she learned that he had not done so. she could not understand it, and she was still more puzzled and surprised when sir laurence told her that he found himself a very much richer man than he had ever expected to be. helen had too much good sense, and even in her secluded, life had learned to estimate facts and to eschew sentimental fallacies; so she did not affect to be indifferent on the subject, or to think that it was quite as well to be poor as to be rich, to be dependent as to be independent; but she did think and feel with very consoling sincerity that cuthbert would have no more scruples about asking her to share his lot when her own had ceased to be of a nature to contrast with it. so she accepted her altered position cheerfully, and asked sir laurence what he would advise her to do, with a true-hearted freedom from anger or jealousy which elevated her to a great height in the mind of the new baronet. sir laurence made her an evasive answer, and begged her to defer any decision on the subject until his return to knockholt. he was going away, first to town, and then abroad, he told her, most probably; and she and mrs. chisholm must remain and take charge there for him. he would keep up the establishment just as it had been, with the exception of the stable department. helen acquiesced with great readiness. she was too completely a lady to feel any awkwardness in such an arrangement, and she knew well that laurence's interests would be best served by her accepting his offer.

"i will stay here then," she said, "and go on just as usual. i don't know whether you are aware that i was sir peregrine's almoner. am i to be yours? the farm-bailiffs, the keepers, and all the rest of your people, are my excellent good friends. i shall get on capitally with them, and go my old rounds in the village, and so forth. but i want to know what i am to do about the charities, the schools, and the promiscuous applications to the 'great house.'"

"i would give you unlimited credit with todd, helen, for all your requirements in that way, but that i fear you would be too conscientious to make sufficient use of it. but stay; the best plan will be to arrange it with farleigh. yes; i'll speak to him, and tell todd he is to give him anything he asks for. i daresay he won't mind a little additional trouble in the cause of his poor people; and you can do the visiting and all that as usual, and report to him."

sir laurence looked at helen as he made this remarkably convenient proposition for rendering the intercourse between the park and the rectory (for cuthbert lived at the rector's house; that is to say, in a corner of it) more frequent than it was at present. helen grew extremely red, and then turned the conversation.

"so, i suppose," said she to mrs. chisholm, after sir laurence had taken his leave, and the two women were talking over his visit and all the late events,--"so i suppose we shall live here until sir laurence is married; and then, when he brings a handsome, dashing, fashionable lady alsager down here, you and i, dear old woman, will go and live in the village; perhaps that pretty little house with the roses and the little white fountain, just big enough for the two ducks that are always swimming in it, may be vacant then; and i daresay laurence would give it to us rent-free, and we should be very snug there; but we would not have ducks, except for dinner; and lady alsager would have us up to tea, i daresay, when there were no fine people at the park. what do you say to all this, mrs. chisholm? doesn't it sound pleasant? what a cosy little place it is! don't you think so?"

"my dear helen, how you do run on?" said the calmer mrs. chisholm; "you are quite in spirits to-day."

she was; for in her sketch of the rural abode with the roses there had been an unmentioned element. helen thought the house would be quite the thing for a curate. helen was always thinking about a curate; and in that respect there was considerable sympathy between her and her companion, for mrs. chisholm was almost always thinking of a curate too. helen's curate was living; mrs. chisholm's was dead. the girl's heart was in a dream of the future; the woman's, in the memory of the sacred past.

cuthbert farleigh had received the intelligence of sir peregrine alsager's unaccountable conduct towards helen manningtree with mingled feelings. he was by no means a commonplace young man, though not the light of learning and the mirror of chivalry which helen believed him. her over-estimate of him did him no harm, for he entertained a tolerably correct opinion of himself; and if the future were destined to unite them, it would probably not militate against her own happiness either. the mistake she made was in degree, not in kind,--a distinction which makes all possible difference. a sensible and dutiful woman may find out that her husband is not possessed of the qualities with which she has believed her lover to be endowed, to the extent with which she accredited him, and her love and esteem may not suffer by the discovery. she would probably recognize that if she had over-rated him (and what a dreadful woman she would be if she had not!) on some points, she had also failed to discover his merits on others, until the intimacy of domestic life had restored the balance of judgment. the mistake, which lays a woman's life waste in its rectification, is that which endows a man with qualities which he does not possess at all,--the mistake which leads to the conviction that the man she has married is not the man she loved, and burdens her with an actual duty and a lost ideal. if helen manningtree were ever to marry cuthbert farleigh, she would incur no such danger; she would have to pay no such price for the indulgence of undisciplined imagination. he was a good and a clever man, and was as highly and wholly disinterested as it is possible for a human being to be, to whom the consideration of meat, drink, clothing, and house-rent is one of rational importance.

he regarded his position with respect to helen as very much improved by the fact that sir peregrine alsager had not left her the fortune, which the gossips of the neighbourhood had taken for granted, and even announced "on authority." on the other hand, he grieved that she should be deprived of the luxurious home and the opulent manner of life to which she had been so long habituated; and as he was not at all a conceited man,--albeit flattered and exalted by all the ladies in the parish, which is ordinarily the bane of curates,--it did occur to him that perhaps helen might have been better and happier if sir peregrine had left her the fortune, and he had adhered to his resolution of leaving her to its enjoyment, unwooed by him. such a supposition was not likely to last long; its cold chill would pass off in the sunshine of free and acknowledged love. free and acknowledged love? yes, the curate was going to tell helen, as soon as he should have learned the particulars of her position, that she had not erred in believing that he loved her, aid to ask her to take all the risks and all the cares of a life which could never have any brilliancy or any luxury to offer her, for the sole consideration of sharing them with him. he had not the smallest doubt of his success. helen's nature was too true, and too well known to him, to render a misgiving possible; still the near approach of the assurance of his hope made him grave and solemn. the orphan-girl loved and trusted him; without him she was alone--alone in a world which is not very easily gotten through with the best of help and companionship. the sense of a great responsibility rested upon him, and his heart was lifted up in no merely conventional or professional prayer. so cuthbert made up his mind, and felt very quiet and solemn about it. that mood would pass away; it would be succeeded by the dazzling delight, the splendid triumph, the fertile fancy, and superhuman hope and exultation of love, as it ought to be; but it is a good omen for any woman whose lover addresses himself to his wooing in such a temper.

thus it fell out that helen and cuthbert, standing together by a window which opened on the broad stone terrace, and watching poor sir peregrine's peacocks, as they marched up and down outside, talked of a future which was to be common to them both, and was to date from the expiration of the year of mourning for sir peregrine alsager. helen had told cuthbert how she had sketched such a charming picture for mrs. chisholm, of the house with the roses; and they had talked a good deal of the nonsense incidental to their position, and which is so much pleasanter than sense,--about whether she had thought of him; and if she had, why she had?--for there is a subtle resemblance to jack bunsby's monologue in the dialogues of lovers;--and then the conversation drifted away to sir laurence alsager.

"we must tell him, my own helen," said the curate; "he has been very kind to you, and i daresay will be very much disgusted at your making so poor a marriage."

the girl looked reproachfully at him, but smiled in a moment, and said, "go on, cuthbert; you are not worth contradicting, you know."

"no, but--" said cuthbert, remonstrating, "you must let me set the world's view before you. no doubt sir laurence will think you very foolish; but he will always be our friend,--i feel sure of that,--though i know he is so different, and lives in so different a world, under so different a system. sometimes, helen, i have had an idea that he found out my secret; though i never could see an inch farther into his life and his heart than it was his good pleasure i should look. yes, my darling, he must know all about us, and soon; for you must remember that it may make a difference in all his plans and arrangements, if he finds you are not to remain here after next spring."

"i hardly think it will do that," said helen; "i fancy he will establish mrs. chisholm here en permanence; that is to say, until he marries."

"is he likely to marry? have you heard anything of that sort?"

"o no! he has never talked of any girls to me. he has never said anything the least like intending to marry. the only woman he ever speaks of--and he does talk of her, and sometimes hears from her--is lady mitford; you remember, you told me about her marriage,--the daughter of mr. stanfield, your old tutor, you know."

"of course, i remember. how strangely things come about! it really seems as if there were only two sets of people in the world; for one never meets any one with whom one has not some link of communication! and georgie stanfield is laurence alsager's female crony and correspondent! how and where is she?"

"in town, i believe; but i don't know much about her. he used to speak of her vaguely, in talking to me of the great world and its hollowness, as of one whom he greatly liked and esteemed, and who was unfortunately circumstanced. he said he would have asked lady mitford down here in the autumn, if he could have asked her without her husband; but that, of course, was impossible, and he could not invite sir charles mitford. i believe they are very unhappy. think of that, cuthbert,--a husband and wife unhappy! a splendid home, with rank and wealth, and misery!" the girl lifted solemn eyes full of wonder and compassion to her lover's face. "sir laurence wished that i could know her, for her sake, he kindly said."

"i wish you could, helen; you would comfort her and do her good: and yet i would not have you saddened, my child, and made wise in the possibilities of life, as you must be if you had the confidence of an unhappy wife. you are better without it, darling--far better without it."

then the curate remembered the alarm he had felt when colonel alsager made his appearance at knockholt park; and he confessed it to helen, who laughed at him, and pretended to scold him, but who was not a little pleased all the time.

"you stupid cuthbert!" said the young lady, to whom the curate had ceased to be an object of awe since their engagement; "it never came into laurence's head to wish to marry me; and i am certain it never crossed any human being's imagination but your own that such a thing could ever happen."

the reverend cuthbert was reluctantly obliged to break off the conversation at this point, and go about his parish business. so he took leave of helen, enjoining her to write to sir laurence that very day, and to make him acquainted with their engagement,--as mrs. chisholm, who had just entered the room, and to whom he referred the matter, gave it as her decided opinion that the communication should be made by helen.

the post was not a subject of such overwhelming importance at knockholt park, its punctuality was not so earnestly discussed, nor was there as much excitement on its arrival, as at the generality of country-houses. mrs. chisholm had very few correspondents; helen had only two, exclusive of sir laurence; and no letters were "due" at this particular time: hence it happened that the ladies often left the breakfast-table before the arrival of the letter-bag, and that its contents awaited their attention undisturbed through more hours of the day than most people would believe possible. mrs. chisholm never read the newspapers until the evening, and helen never read them at all, being content with cuthbert's version of public affairs. on this particular morning, however, helen thought proper to remain in the breakfast-room until the post should arrive. the truth was she shrank from the task of writing to sir laurence, and she knew she ought to set about it at once; so she lingered and fidgeted about the breakfast-room long after mrs. chisholm had betaken herself to her daily confabulation with the housekeeper. thus she was alone when the letter-bag was brought in, and she turned over its contents, expecting to find them of the usual uninteresting nature. there were several letters for sir laurence "to be forwarded," a number of circulars, a few letters for some of the servants, the customary newspapers, and lastly--a missive for helen herself. it was a large letter in a blue envelope, and directed in a lawyer-like hand helen opened it, feeling a little frightened, and found that the cover enclosed a packet addressed to her, in the hand of sir laurence alsager, and marked "private."

"what on earth can laurence be writing to me about that requires such precaution?" thought helen anxiously; and then she rang the bell, handed over the other letters to the footman for proper distribution, and retired to her own room, where she read the following:

"dover.

"my dear helen,--i am devoting the last evening which i shall pass in england for an indefinite period, to writing to you a letter, which i shall take the precaution of sending so that its existence may be known to none but you, at the present time. a certain portion of its contents must necessarily be communicated to others; but you will use your discretion, upon which in this, and all other things, i rely with absolute confidence.

"you must not let this preamble alarm you; there is nothing to occasion you any trouble or sorrow in what i am about to say to you. it will be a long story, and, i daresay, a clumsily--told one, for i am eminently unready with my pen; but it will interest you, helen, for my sake and for your own. when i tell you that this story is not a new one,-that it does not include anything that has occurred after i left knockholt, though i am indirectly impelled to write it to you by circumstances which have happened since then,--you will wonder why i did not tell it to you in person, during the period when our companionship was so close and easy,--so delightful to me, and i am quite sure i may add, so pleasant to you. i could not tell you then, because i was not sufficiently sure of myself. i had an experiment to try--an experience to undergo--before i could be certain, even in the limited sense of human security, of my own future; and until these were over and done with, all was vague for me. they are over and done with now: and i am going to tell you all about yourself, and a good deal about myself.

"you know that among the sorrows of my life there is one which must be life-long. it is the remembrance of my conduct to my father, and of the long tacit estrangement which preceded our last meeting, and which, but for a providential interposition, might never have been even so far atoned for and mitigated as it was before his death. it would be difficult to account for this estrangement; it is impossible to excuse it; there never was any reproach on either side,--indeed there could not have been on mine, for the fault was all my own,--and there never was any explanation. my father doubtless believed, as he was justified in believing, that any wish of his would have little weight with me;--he seldom expressed one; and i am convinced that one thing on which he had set his heart very strongly, one paramount desire, he cautiously abstained from expressing, that he might, by keeping me ignorant of it during his lifetime, give it the additional chance of realization which it might derive from the sanctity of a posthumous appeal to the feelings of an undutiful and careless son, when those feelings should be intensified by unavailing regret. i did learn, dear helen, after the barrier of eternal silence had been placed between my father and me, that he had cherished one paramount desire, and that he had resorted to such an expedient in order to induce me to respect and to fulfil it.

"my amazement and discomfiture when i found that my father's will was of so far distant a date that it made no mention of you were great. i could not understand why he had not supplemented the will which existed by another, in which you would be amply provided for, and his wishes concerning your future fully explained. my long and wilful absence from my father had prevented my having any real acquaintance with you. to me you were merely a name, seldom heard, hardly remembered. had i not gone to knockholt when i did, you would have remained so; and there was no one else who could be supposed to take an obligatory interest in you. how came it, i thought, that my father had taken no precaution against such a contingency--which, in fact, had so nearly been a reality? you will say he trusted to the honour and the gentlemanly feeling of his son; and so i read the riddle also; but reflection showed me that i was wrong. a more strictly just man never lived than my father; and he must have been strictly unjust had he allowed the future fortunes of a young girl whom he had reared and educated--who had been to him as a daughter for years--to depend upon the caprice or the generosity of a man to whom she was an utter stranger, and between whom and herself the tie of blood was of the slightest description. nor was delicacy less characteristic of my father than justice. (ah, helen, how keenly i can see all these things now that he is gone!) he would have shrunk as sensitively as you would from anything that would have obliged you and me to meet for the first time in the characters of pensioned and pensioner. i knew all this; and i was utterly confounded at the absence of any later will. i had the most complete and diligent search made; but in vain. there was no will, helen, but there was a letter. in the drawer of the desk which my father always used, there was a letter. how do you think it was addressed? not to 'my son'--not to 'colonel alsager;' but to 'sir laurence alsager, bart.'! it was a painful letter--painful and precious; painful because a tone of sadness, of disappointment, of content in feeling that the writer had nearly reached his term of life, pervaded it; precious because it was full of pardon and peace, of the fulness of love for his only son. i cannot let you see the letter,--it is too sacred for any eyes but those for which it was intended; but i can tell you some of its contents, and i can make you understand its tone. as a mother speaks to her son going forth into the arena of life, the night before their parting, in the dark, on her knees, by his bedside, with her head upon his pillow; as she speaks of the time to come, when she will watch and wait for him, of the time that is past, whose memories are so precious, which she bids him remember and be brave and true; as she makes light of all his faults and shortcomings,--so did my dear old father--my father who had grown gray and old; alone, when i might have been with him, and was not--write to me. god bless him, and god forgive me! he never reproached me, living; what punishment he has inflicted upon me, dead! the letter was long; and it varied, i think, through every key in which human tenderness can be sung. but enough of this.

"a portion of the contents concerned you nearly, my dear helen. i can repeat them to you briefly. i knew, and you know, that your father and my father--very distant relatives--had been playmates in boyhood, and attached friends in manhood. we knew that your father died on his voyage home from india, and just after he had consigned you and your black nurse to the care of the captain of the ship, to be sent, on landing, to knockholt park. i believe you have your father's letter to my father, in which he solemnly, but fearlessly, entreats his protection for the orphan child, whose credentials it is to form. he had left your mother and her baby in an alien grave at barrackpore, and i suppose he had not the strength to live for you only, 'little nelly,' as they called you then. at all events, he died; and i knew in a vague kind of way about that, and my father's care of you, and how you grew up with him, and made his home cheerful and happy, which his only son left carelessly, and forsook for long. the letter recapitulated all this, and told me besides, that your mother had been my father's first love. perhaps she was also his only love--god knows. he was a good husband to my mother during their brief married life, i am sure; for i remember her well; and she was always smiling and happy. but the girl he loved had preferred robert manningtree with nothing but his commission, to peregrine alsager with a large estate and a baronetcy for his fortunate future. my father, preux chevalier that he was, did not forget to tell me that she never repented or had reason to regret that preference. thus, helen, you were a legacy to him, bequeathed not alone by friendship, but by love. as such he accepted you; as such he prized you, calm and undemonstrative as he was; as such it was the cherished purpose of his life to intrust you to me--not that i was to be your guardian in his place, but that i was to be your husband. he thought well of me, in spite of all, you see; he did not despair of his ungracious son, or he never would have dreamed of conferring so great a privilege on me, of suffering you to incur so great a risk. he had had this darling project so strongly in his mind, and yet had been so convinced that any betrayal of it to me would only prevent my seeking you, that my persistent neglect of the old home had a double bitterness for him; and at length, two years ago, hearing a rumour that i was about to marry one of the beauties of the season, he relinquished it, and determined to make a will, bequeathing to you the larger portion of his unentailed property. the rumour was true as to my intentions, but false as to my success. the lady in question jilted me for a richer marriage, thank god! i don't say this from pique, but from conviction; for i have seen her and her husband, and i have seen her since her husband's death. she did not hold her perjured state long; nor did she win the prize for which she jilted me. i am a much richer man than her husband ever was, and he has left her comparatively poor. in a storm of rage and disgust i left england, without going to knockholt--without having seen you since your childhood--without bidding my father farewell. this grieved him much: but i was free; i was not married. i was labouring under angry and bitter feelings towards all womankind. i should come home again, my father thought, still unmarried, and his hope would be fulfilled. he did not make the will. i remained away much longer than he supposed i should have done, and not nearly so long as in my anger and mortification i had determined to remain. you know the rest, dear helen--you know that i lingered and dallied with time and duty, and did not go to knockholt until it was all but too late. a little while before he met with the accident, my father had written a letter somewhat similar in purport; but he had not seen me then, and i suppose it was not warmly affectionate enough for the old man's liking, and he wrote that which i now mention at many, and, i fear, painful, intervals of his brief convalescence. it was finished just a week before he died.

"you will have read all this with emotion, helen; and i daresay at this point your feelings will be very painful. mine are little less so, and the task of fully explaining them to you is delicate and difficult. the truthfulness, the candour of your nature will come to my assistance when you read, as their remembrance aids me while i write. my first impulse on reading my father's letter was to exult in the thought that there was anything possible to me by which his wishes could be respected. my second--and it came speedily--was to feel that the marriage he desired between us never could take place. are you reassured, helen? have you been frightened at the image your fancy has created, of a debt of gratitude to be discharged to sir peregrine at the cost of your own happiness, or disavowed at the cost of seeming cold, ungrateful, and undutiful? have you had a vision of me in the character of an importunate suitor, half imploring a concession, half pressing a right, and wholly distasteful to you? if you have, dismiss it, for it is only a vision, and never will be realized to distress you. why do i say this? because i know that not only do you not love me, but that you do love cuthbert farleigh. forgive the plainness and directness with which i allude to a fact yet perhaps unavowed to him, but perfectly well known by and acknowledged to yourself. no betrothal could make you more truly his than you have been by the tacit promise of your own heart--i know not for how long, but before i came to knockholt park, i am sure. if i had not seen the man, i should equally have discerned the fact, for i am observant; and though i have, i hope, outlived the first exuberance of masculine conceit, i did not err in imputing the tranquil, ladylike indifference with which you received me to a preoccupied mind, rather than to an absence of interest or curiosity about the almost unknown son of your guardian. life at knockholt park has little variety or excitement to offer; and the advent of a guardsman, a demi-semi-cousin, and an heir-apparent, would have made a little more impression, would it not, had not the church secured its proper precedence of the army? i perceived the state of things with satisfaction; for i liked you very much from the first, and i thought cuthbert a very good fellow; just the man to hold your respect all his life long and to make you happy. in my reflections on your share, then, in the impossibility of the fulfilment of my father's request, i experienced little pain. my own was not so easily disposed of after his death as during his life. i was destined to frustrate his wishes. had you and i met, as we ought to have done, long before; had i had the good fortune to have seen you and learned to contrast you with the meretricious and heartless of your sex, who had frittered away my heart and soured my temper, perhaps, helen, i might have won you, and the old man might have been made happy.

"we met under circumstances which made any such destiny for us impossible, for reasons which equally affected both. my preoccupation was of a different sort from yours; it had neither present happiness nor future hope in it,--it had much of the elements of doubt and fear; but it was powerful, far more powerful than i then thought, and powerful it will always be. all this is enigmatical to you, dear helen, and it must remain so. i would not have said anything about it, but that i owed it to you, to the friendship which i trust will never know a chill, to prevent your supposing that your share in the frustration of my father's wishes is disproportionate to mine. i would not have you think--as without this explanation you might justly think--that i magnanimously renounce my claims, my pretensions to your love in favour of the actual possessor. no, helen; for us both our meeting was too late. we were not to love each other; i was not to be suffered to win the heart of a true and priceless woman, such as you are, when i had not a heart to give her in exchange. but though we were not to love each other, we were destined to be friends--friends in the fullest and firmest sense; and believe me, friendship between a man and woman, with its keen sympathy, its unrestrained, confidence, and its perfect toleration, is a tie as valuable as it is rare.

"now i have told you almost all i have to tell about my father's letter. i suppose we shall both feel, and continue always to feel, that there was something hard, something almost cruel in the fate which marked him out for disappointment, and you and me for its ministers. but this must be; and we must leave it so, and turn to the present and vital interests of our lives. we shall think of him and mourn for him none the less that we will speak of this no more.

"strong as was my father's desire for our marriage, dear helen, and his persuasion that it would come to pass, in his abstraction and his want of observation he failed to take farleigh into account; or perhaps, like all old people, he did not realize the fact that the child, the girl, had grown into a woman. he did not quite forget to provide for the contingency of its non-fulfilment. 'if, for any reason, it may not be. lance,' he wrote--'if florence hillyard's child is not to be the mistress of the home which might have been her mother's, see that she has a dowry befitting my daughter and your sister.' no sentence in his letter touched me more with its simple trust than did that.

"i have seen very clearly into the state of your feelings, as i am sure you allow, and i don't think i have blundered about that of farleigh's. he has not told you in formal words the fact patent to every one's observation, that he entirely reciprocates your devotion (don't be vexed, helen; one may pet a curate, you know), because he's poor, and you were likely to be rich. he believes, as every one believes, that you are as poor as himself; a belief, by the way, which does not say much for the general estimate of my character--but that does not matter; and in that faith he will not hesitate any longer. will you be discreet, and say nothing at all of my intention of carrying out this privately-expressed wish of my father? will you prove your possession of the qualities i give you credit for, by leaving cuthbert in the belief that he will have in you a portionless bride, save for your dowry of beauty and worth? i really almost think you will, helen; especially as, though you do not need any further confirmation of farleigh's nobility of mind than the silence he has hitherto kept, and the alacrity with which he will now doubtless break it, it will be well for mrs. chisholm and for myself, your only friends, to know how amply he fulfils our expectations. i almost think you will; but i intend to make assurance doubly sure by not giving you the slightest satisfaction on the subject of my intentions. when your marriage is near, you shall learn how i mean to fulfil my father's last injunction, but not till then; and if you tell farleigh anything about it until i give you leave, i vow i won't give you a shilling.

"you see i have written myself into good spirits, dear helen; the thought of you cheers me almost as your kindly presence would do. what more have i to say? not much more of myself, or of yourself, save that the dearest and warmest wish i entertain is for your welfare.

"i shall send from my first halting-place on the continent full instructions to todd, in case my absence should be much prolonged. i cannot speak with any certainty of its duration; it does not depend on my own inclination.

"and now, in conclusion, i am going to ask you to do something for me, which i shall take as the truest proof that the friendship i prize and rely upon is really mine. i am sure you have not forgotten the friend i mentioned to you--lady mitford. i have seen her in town, and found her in much grief and perplexity. the cause of her sorrow is not one on which i can venture to enter to you; but it is deep-seated, incurable. i am much distressed for her, and can in no way defend or comfort her. she was an only child, motherless, and brought up in seclusion by her father,--an exemplary country clergyman, but a man whose knowledge of the world was quite theoretical and elementary, and who could not have trained her so that she would know how to encounter such trials as hers; he probably did not know that such could exist. as i told you at knockholt, she has no female friend; unfortunately she has female enemies--one in particular. my great wish is to procure her the one, and defend her from the other. i may fail in the latter object; but you, helen, can aid me, if you will, to fulfil the former. i have spoken to her about you, and have assured her that she might trust in your kindliness, though your inexperience is far greater than her own. i cannot bring you together now--there is no time or opportunity; but i want you to promise me that, if at any time during my absence from england lady mitford asks you to come to her, you will go promptly, and will be to her all that is in you to be to one unjustly oppressed, cruelly betrayed, and sorely afflicted. will you do this for me, helen? and will you give me an assurance that i may rely upon you to do it (this is the only portion of my letter which you need reply to, if you have any feeling that you would rather not) before next wednesday, and addressed to me at the hotel meurice, paris?--always affectionately yours,

"laurance alsager."