you know that, pretty prophetess?" said Percival, with the
superior air of manhood. "I have seen more of the world than you have,
and I cannot see why Ardworth should succeed, as you call it; or, if
so, why he should succeed less if he swung his hammock in a better berth
than that hole in Gray's Inn, and would just let me keep him a cab and
groom."

Had Percival talked of keeping John Ardworth an elephant and a palaquin,
Helen could not have been more amused. She clapped her little hands in
a delight that provoked Percival, and laughed out loud. Then, seeing her
boy-lover's lip pouted petulantly, and his brow was overcast, she said,
more seriously,--

"Do you not know what it is to feel convinced of something which you
cannot explain? Well, I feel this as to my cousin's fame and fortunes.
Surely, too, you must feel it, you scarce know why, when he speaks of
that future which seems so dim and so far to me, as of something that
belonged to him."

"Very true, Helen," said Percival; "he lays it out like the map of his
estate. One can't laugh when he says so carelessly: 'At such an age I
shall lead my circuit; at such an age I shall be rich; at such an age
I shall enter parliament; and beyond that I shall look as yet--no
farther.' And, poor fellow, then he will be forty-three! And in the mean
while to suffer such privations!"

"There are no privations to one who lives in the future," said Helen,
with that noble intuition into lofty natures which at times flashed from
her childish simplicity, foreshadowing what, if Heaven spare her life,
her maturer intellect may develop; "for Ardworth there is no such thing
as poverty. He is as rich in his hopes as we are in--" She stopped
short, blushed, and continued, with downcast looks: "As well might you
pity me in these walks, so dreary without you. I do not live in them, I
live in my thoughts of you."

Her voice trembled with emotion in those last words. She slid from
Percival's arm, and timidly sat down (and he beside her) on a little
mound under the single chestnut-tree, that threw its shade over the
garden.

Both were silent for some moments,--Percival, with grateful ecstasy;
Helen, with one of those sudden fits of mysterious melancholy to which
her nature was so subjected.

He was the first to speak. "Helen," he said gravely, "since I have known
you, I feel as if life were a more solemn thing than I ever regarded it
before. It seems to me as if a new and more arduous dut