self the next morning, as if nothing had
happened. Helen Darley knew nothing of it all until she hard risen, when
the gossipy matron of the establishment made her acquainted with all its
details, embellished with such additional ornamental appendages as it had
caught up in transmission from lip to lip. She did not love to betray
her sensibilities, but she was pale and tremulous and very nearly tearful
when Mr. Bernard entered the sitting-room, showing on his features traces
of the violent shock he had received and the heavy slumber from which he
had risen with throbbing brows. What the poor girl's impulse was, on
seeing him, we need not inquire too curiously. If he had been her own
brother, she would have kissed him and cried on his neck; but something
held her back. There is no galvanism in kiss-your-brother; it is copper
against copper: but alien bloods develop strange currents, when they flow
close to each other, with only the films that cover lip and cheek between
them. Mr. Bernard, as some of us may remember, violated the proprieties
and laid himself open to reproach by his enterprise with a bouncing
village-girl, to whose rosy cheek an honest smack was not probably an
absolute novelty. He made it all up by his discretion and good behavior
now. He saw by Helen's moist eye and trembling lip that her woman's
heart was off its guard, and he knew, by the infallible instinct of sex,
that he should be forgiven, if he thanked her for her sisterly sympathies
in the most natural way,--expressive, and at the same time economical of
breath and utterance. He would not give a false look to their friendship
by any such demonstration. Helen was a little older than himself, but
the aureole of young womanhood had not yet begun to fade from around her.
She was surrounded by that enchanted atmosphere into which the girl walks
with dreamy eyes, and out of which the woman passes with a story written
on her forehead. Some people think very little of these refinements;
they have not studied magnetism and the law of the square of the
distance.

So Mr. Bernard thanked Helen for her interest without the aid of the
twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet,--the love labial,--the limping
consonant which it takes two to speak plain. Indeed, he scarcely let her
say a word, at first; for he saw that it was hard for her to conceal her
emotion. No wonder; he had come within a hair's-breadth of losing his
life, and he had been a very kind