ful girl of seventeen, the bridegroom a plain man of
seven-and-fifty. In this case, at least, the father was right. He lived
long enough to see that the young wife was unusually attached to her
kind and indulgent husband, and died, about a twelve-month after
the marriage, with the fullest confidence in her respectability and
happiness. Mr. Cameron did not long survive him. Before she was nineteen
the fair Helen Cameron was a widow and an orphan, with one beautiful
boy, to whom she was left sole personal guardian, an income being
secured to her ample for her rank in life, but clogged with the one
condition of her not marrying again.

Such was the tenant, who, wearied of her dull suburban home, a red
brick house in the middle of a row of red brick houses; tired of the
loneliness which never presses so much upon the spirits as when left
solitary in the environs of a great city; pining for country liberty,
for green trees, and fresh air; much caught by the picturesque-ness
of Upton, and its mixture of old-fashioned stateliness and village
rusticity; and, perhaps, a little swayed by a desire to be near an
old friend and correspondent of the mother, to whose memory she was so
strongly attached, came in the budding spring time, the showery, flowery
month of April, to spend the ensuing summer at the Court.

We, on our part, regarded her arrival with no common interest. To me
it seemed but yesterday since I had received an epistle of thanks for
a present of one of dear Mary Howitt's charming children's books,--an
epistle undoubtedly not indited by the writer,--in huge round text,
between double pencil lines, with certain small errors of orthography
corrected in as mailer hand above; followed in due time by postscripts
to her mother's letters, upon one single line, and the spelling much
amended; then by a short, very short note, in French; and at last, by a
despatch of unquestionable authenticity, all about doves and rabbits,--a
holiday scrawl, rambling, scrambling, and uneven, and free from
restraint as heart could desire. It appeared but yesterday since Helen
Graham was herself a child; and here she was, within two miles of us, a
widow and a mother!

Our correspondence had been broken off by the death of Mrs. Graham when
she was about ten years old, and although I had twice called upon her
in my casual visits to town during the lifetime of Mr. Cameron;
and although these visits had been most punctually returned, it had
happe