at it was the same place where he had first seen her. She
had written to him, and now there had come a pause. She had nothing to
do but to wait.

But though such waiting is at best but a tedious matter, those few days
brought their own peculiar happiness to her. She would have found it
impossible to have confided her secret to any human being; she had no
bosom friend to whom she could go for sympathy. But her healthy,
open-air life, her long solitary walks, and a certain vein of poetry
which she undoubtedly possessed, had given her some of that passionate,
almost personal, love of nature which is sweeter by far than any human
friendship. For her those long stretches of wild moorland, with the dark
silent tarns and far-distant line of blue hills, the high cliffs where
the sea wind roared with all the bluster and fury of a late March, the
sea itself with its ever-changing face, the faint streaks of brilliant
color in the evening sky, or the wan glare of a stormy morning--all
these things had their own peculiar meaning to her, and awoke always
some echo of response in her heart. And it chanced that at that time all
the sweet breezy freshness of a late spring was making glad the country
which she loved, and the perfect sympathy of the season with her own
happiness seemed to her very sweet, for it was springtime too in her
heart. A new life glowed in her veins, and sometimes it seemed to her
that she could see the vista of her whole future bathed in the warm
sunlight of a new-born happiness. The murmuring pine groves, the gay
reveling of the birds, the budding flowers and heath--all these things
appealed to her with a strange sympathetic force. So she took long
walks, and came home with sparkling eyes, and her cheeks full of a rich
color, till her father wondered what had come to his proud silent
daughter to give this new buoyancy to her frame, and added physical
beauty to her face, which had once seemed to him a little too
_spirituelle_ and ethereal.

Once more Helen and her father sat at breakfast out on the sheltered
balcony of Thurwell Court. Below them the gardens, still slightly coated
with the early morning dew, were bathed in the glittering sunshine, and
in the distance, and over the tops of the trees in the park, a slight
feathery mist was curling upward. The sweet, fresh air, still a little
keen, was buoyant with all the joyous exhilaration of spring, and
nature, free at last from the saddened grip of winter, was