oor child.
More than this. I must tell you all now, out of the depth of this
trouble through which I am passing. I have loved you from the moment
we first met; and if my life has anything left worth accepting, it is
yours. Will you take the offered gift?"

Helen looked in his face, surprised, bewildered.

"This is not for me,--not for me," she said. "I am but a poor faded
flower, not worth the gathering, of such a one as you. No, no,--I have
been bred to humble toil all my days, and I could not be to you what
you ought to ask. I am accustomed to a kind of loneliness and
self-dependence. I have seen nothing, almost, of the world, such as you
were born 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 her