y happy woman; but still, if you carry any
regret for that day in your heart, I wish I had died when I was so sick
before you came: I wish I lay up there on the hill with the grass
growing over me."

What was anybody to do with this overwrought, fanciful child? She was so
wonderfully pretty too, with her great dark, melancholy eyes, her
flushed, tear-stained cheeks, her rich rare lips! "Oh, Helen," I
murmured, holding her close to me, "I don't want you to go under the
green grass: I'm very glad you are alive. I would have broken all my
bones in your service that day and welcome, so that you might be well
and unhurt. Come, now, cheer up: I am going to be a pleasanter fellow
than I have been of late. Dry your eyes, dear. Your father will be
laughing at you. Come, let us go and take a stroll in the moonlight: it
is quite wicked not to indulge in a little romance on a sweet midsummer
night like this."

When I had gone to my room that night, and sat, still bitter, still
discontented, looking off through my open window toward the Point, and
wondering who was looking in Georgy Lenox's starry eyes just
then--thinking, with a feeling about my forehead like a band of burning
iron, that some man's arm was sure to be about her waist, her face
upturned to his, her floating golden hair across his shoulder as they
danced,--while, I say, such fancies held a firm clutch over my brain and
senses, devouring me with the throes of an insane jealousy, my mother
came in and sat down beside me.

"My dear boy," she said, putting her hand on my shoulder, "I am going to
give you a caution. You must remember that Helen, with all her frankness
and impetuosity, is still no child. Don't win her heart unthinkingly."

I felt the blood rush to my face, and I think I had never in all my life
experienced such embarrassment.

"I'm not such a coxcomb, mother, as to believe any girl could fall in
love with me--Helen above all others."

She smiled, with a little inward amusement in her smile. "You must
remember," she said again softly, "that Helen is not a child, and you
surely would not make her suffer."

"Why, mother," I gasped, "we are just like brother and sister: our
intimacy is the habit of years."

"Good-night, my son," my mother said, and went away still smiling: "I
have perfect faith in your magnanimity."

I remembered with a flash of guilty self-consciousness one or two
little circumstances about our talk by the window two hours before wh