rn to move in. Leave me to my obscure place and duties; I shall
at least have peace;--and you--you will surely find in due time some one
better fitted by Nature and training to make you happy."

"No, Miss Darley!" Dudley Venner said, almost sternly. "You must not
speak to a man, who has lived through my experiences, of looking about
for a new choice after his heart has once chosen. Say that you can never
love me; say that I have lived too long to share your young life; say
that sorrow has left nothing in me for Love to find his pleasure in; but
do not mock me with the hope of a new affection for some unknown object.
The first look of yours brought me to your side. The first tone of your
voice sunk into my heart. From this moment my life must wither out or
bloom anew. My home is desolate. Come under my roof and make it bright
once more,--share my life with me,--or I shall give the halls of the old
mansion to the bats and the owls, and wander forth alone without a hope
or a friend!"

To find herself with a man's future at the disposal of a single word of
hers!--a man like this, too, with a fascination for her against which
she had tried to shut her heart, feeling that he lived in another sphere
than hers, working as she was for her bread a poor operative in the
factory of a hard master and jealous overseer, the salaried drudge of Mr.
Silas Peckham! Why, she had thought he was grateful to her as a friend
of his daughter; she had even pleased herself with the feeling that he
liked her, in her humble place, as a woman of some cultivation and many
sympathetic points of relation with himself; but that he loved her,--that
this deep, fine nature, in a man so far removed from her in outward
circumstance, should have found its counterpart in one whom life had
treated so coldly as herself,--that Dudley Venner should stake his
happiness on a breath of hers,--poor Helen Darley's,--it was all a
surprise, a confusion, a kind of fear not wholly fearful. Ah, me! women
know what it is, that mist over the eyes, that trembling in the limbs,
that faltering of the voice, that sweet, shame-faced, unspoken confession
of weakness which does not wish to be strong, that sudden overflow in the
soul where thoughts loose their hold on each other and swim single and
helpless in the flood of emotion,--women know what it is!

No doubt she was a little frightened and a good deal bewildered, and that
her sympathies were warmly excited for a frie