t all; and John would declare, as he sank into his
easy-chair in the half twilight and surveyed the warm place, which
seemed only a ruddy background for Lilian's fairness, that he never
wanted anything better than this as long as he lived. It hurt him
sometimes, though, to remember that Lilian never made any response to
such words. "Well, well," he would say to himself in a way he had,
"why should she? and why should I expect it of her? If people are born
with wings, they do not want to creep. She beautifies everything she
touches, and she is only in her right place when all the flower of the
world's beauty is about her. But some day that shall be; and meantime
there is nothing to hinder my liking this." He had almost an ideal
home with Lilian's mother, as he wrote to his own mother, and every
time he went out of it in the morning he felt himself a better man
than he was when he went into it at night. His mother and father
journeyed a thousand miles to see it, and felt as John did
himself--thanked Heaven for the promise of a child like Lilian--one so
forgetful of herself, so thoughtful for every one else, so candid, so
generous, so gentle, so good. "She is nothing but a child," said Mrs.
Sterling for the thousandth time, "and yet how lofty she is!--so lofty
and so sweet! What will she be at thirty if she is this at seventeen?
It makes me tremble to think of John's being blest so, as if it were
too much, as if some fate must overtake him."

"He must become a very superior man under the influence of such a wife
as Lilian will be," said Mr. Sterling. "Helen shall go on and spend
the winter with John: they teach canaries to sing," said he, stroking
Helen's black hair, "by hanging up their cages in the same room with a
nightingale's."

And so Helen was despatched on the journey, and made another member in
the little family, for John's friends merely had rooms, and enjoyed
no more sufferance than other guests in the penetralia of the house.
She was a gaunt and big-eyed child, with a certain promise of
magnificence that, as Reyburn said, might be fulfilled in a year or
two in a sumptuous sort of beauty. But now she was a morbid and
retiring creature, fourteen or fifteen years old, looking out askance
and half suspiciously on the world from under the shadow of her
immense eyelashes, and singing from room to room with a strange voice
that a year or two would ripen into tones fit for a siren. There was
just the difference in ag