at.
Then, perhaps--only perhaps--the dew-drops which I showed you last night in
the white japonica were God's eyes!"

"May be so," returned Bell, simply.

They were two strange children--nature, and, perhaps, circumstances had
made them so. They were born and had always lived in the old house. Their
mother was in heaven, and their father was one of those who go down to the
sea in ships. With no one to teach them, save the old house-keeper Nanny,
their minds had taken odd turns and conceits; they had grown up old people
in a hundred ways.

The roar of the winds and the sea had been in their ears from infancy. In
the summer months they wandered late on the sandy beaches, or slept with
the silent sunshine under the cherry trees. They had grown up with nature,
and nature beat in them like another heart. She had imbued them with her
richer and tenderer moods.

Bell was the wildest and strangest of the two. She was one of those aerial
little creatures who, somehow or other, get into this world sometimes--it
must be by slipping through the fingers of the angels, for they seem
strangely out of place, and I am sure that they are missed somewhere! They
never stay long! They come to earth and sometimes ripen for heaven in a
twelve month! The sweetest flowers are those that die in the spring-time:
they touch the world with beauty, and are gone, before a ruder breath than
that of God scatters their perfume. Bell was a _Gipsy angel_--one of those
who wander, for awhile, outside the walls of heaven, in the shady pastures
and by-ways of the world.

"Mortimer," said Bell, after a long silence, "how nice it is to sit here
and watch the bits of sails coming and going--coming and going, never
weary! I wonder how long we have sat at this window and watched the white
specks? I wonder if it will always be so; if you and I will still be here,
loving the sea and stars, when our heads are as white as Nanny's?"

"No!" cried the boy, impetuously. "I am going out into the broad, deep
world, and write books full of wonderful thought, like the Arabian Nights!"

And he repeated it, the broad, deep world! Ah, child! what have such
dreamers as you to do in the broad, deep world--the wonderful, restless
sea, where men cast the net of thought and bring up pebbles?

"I would like that, Mort!" cried Bell, clapping her hands. "But then, what
a grand place this would be to write them in! You can have your desk by the
open window here; and when your ey