reasserting
itself in one glad triumphant chorus. Down in the park the slumberous
cawing of the rooks triumphed over the lighter-voiced caroling of
innumerable thrushes and blackbirds, and mingled with the faint humming
of a few early bees, seemed to fill the air with a sweetly blended
strain of glad music. It was one of those mornings typical of its own
season, in which the whole atmosphere seems charged with quickening
life. Summer with its warm luscious glow, and autumn with its clear calm
repose, have their own special charms. But a spring morning, coming
after the deep sadness of a hard winter, gains much by the contrast.
There is overflowing energy and passionate joy in its newly beating
pulses, the warm delight of reawakening life, happy to find the earth so
fair a place, which the staider charms of a more developed season
altogether lack.

It was in some measure owing to this influence, and also to the fact
that she held in her hand a letter from her lover, which her father had
handed her without remark, but with a somewhat curious glance, that
Helen was feeling very happy that morning. The last year had dealt
strangely with her. Tragedy had thrown its startling, gloomy shadow
across her life, and had left traces which could never be altogether
wiped out. Anxieties of another sort had come, perplexities and strange
unhappy doubts, although these last had burned with a fitful, uncertain
flame and now seemed stilled for ever. But triumphing over all these was
this new-born love, the great deep joy of a woman's life, so vast, so
sweet and beautiful, that it transfuses her whole being, and seems to
lift her into another world.

And so Helen, leaning back in her chair, with her eyes wandering idly
over the pleasant gardens and park below, to where, through a deep gap
in the trees, was just visible a faint blue line of sea, was wrapped up
very much in her own thoughts, and scarcely doing her duty toward
entertaining her father. Indeed, she seemed almost unconscious of his
presence until he looked up suddenly from a letter he was reading and
asked her a question.

"By the bye, Helen," he said, "I've meant to ask you something every day
since you've been home, but I have always forgotten it. Who was that
young man who came down here to help Johnson with the auditing, and who
went away so suddenly? A _protege_ of yours, I suppose, as he came here
on your recommendation?"

"Yes, I was interested in him," she answered