. "I wish I could help
you! What can I do?"

"You can do nothing," she said. "What can any one do?"

"I wish, I wish I could help you!" he repeated. "East Lynne was not,
take it for all in all, a pleasant home to you, but it seems you changed
for the worse when you left."

"Not a pleasant home?" she echoed, its reminiscences appearing
delightful in that moment, for it must be remembered that all things are
estimated by comparison. "Indeed it was; I may never have so pleasant a
one again. Mr. Carlyle, do not disparage East Lynne to me! Would I could
awake and find the last few months but a hideous dream!--that I could
find my dear father alive again!--that we were still living peacefully
at East Lynne. It would be a very Eden to me now."

What was Mr. Carlyle about to say? What emotion was it that agitated his
countenance, impeded his breath, and dyed his face blood-red? His better
genius was surely not watching over him, or those words had never been
spoken.

"There is but one way," he began, taking her hand and nervously playing
with it, probably unconscious that he did so; "only one way in which you
could return to East Lynne. And that way--I may not presume, perhaps, to
point it out."

She looked at him and waited for an explanation.

"If my words offend you, Lady Isabel, check them, as their presumption
deserves, and pardon me. May I--dare I--offer you to return to East
Lynne as its mistress?"

She did not comprehend him in the slightest degree: the drift of his
meaning never dawned upon her. "Return to East Lynne as its mistress?"
she repeated, in bewilderment.

"And as my wife?"

No possibility of misunderstanding him now, and the shock and surprise
were great. She had stood there by Mr. Carlyle's side conversing
confidentially with him, esteeming him greatly, feeling as if he
were her truest friend on earth, clinging to him in her heart as to
a powerful haven of refuge, loving him almost as she would a brother,
suffering her hand to remain in his. _But to be his wife!_ the idea had
never presented itself to her in any shape until this moment, and her
mind's first emotion was one of entire opposition, her first movement
to express it, as she essayed to withdraw herself and her hand away from
him.

But not so; Mr. Carlyle did not suffer it. He not only retained that
hand, but took the other also, and spoke, now the ice was broken,
eloquent words of love. Not unmeaning phrases of rhapsody, about heart