s eyes from the page, which he had a habit of doing,
he was sure to encounter a glance of bright intelligence and thrilling
sensibility, instantaneously withdrawn, and then he often lost his
place, skipped over a paragraph, or read the same sentence a second
time, while that rich mantling glow, so seldom seen on the cheek of
manhood, stole slowly over his face.

These were happy evenings, and Helen could have exclaimed with little
Frank in the primer, "Oh! that winter would last forever!" And yet there
were times when she as well as her parents was oppressed with a weight
of anxious sorrow that was almost insupportable, on account of Louis. He
came not, he wrote not--and the only letter received from him had
excited the most painful apprehensions for his moral safety. It
contained shameful records of his past deviations from rectitude, and
judging of the present by the past, they had every reason to fear that
he had become an alien from virtue and home. Mr. Gleason seldom spoke of
him, but his long fits of abstraction, the gloom of his brow, and the
inquietude of his eye, betrayed the anxiety and grief rankling within.

Helen knew not the contents of her brother's letter, nor the secret
cause of grief that preyed on her father's mind, but his absence and
silence were trials over which she openly and daily mourned with deep
and increasing sorrow.

"We shall hear from him to-morrow. He will come to-morrow." This was the
nightly lullaby to her disappointed and murmuring heart.

Mittie likewise repeated to herself the same refrain "He will come
to-morrow. He will write to-morrow." But it was not of Louis that the
prophecy was breathed. It was of another, who had become the one
thought.

Helen had not forgotten her old friend Miss Thusa, whom the rigors of
winter confined more closely than ever to her lonely cabin. Almost every
day she visited her, and even if the ground were covered with snow, and
icicles hung from the trees, there was a path through the woods, printed
with fairy foot-tracks, that showed where Helen had walked. Mr. Gleason
supplied the solitary spinster with wood ready out for the hearth, had
her cottage banked with dark red tan, and furnished her with many
comforts and luxuries. He never forgot her devoted attachment to his
dead wife, who had commended to his care and kindness the lone woman on
her dying bed. Mrs. Gleason frequently accompanied Helen in her visits,
and as Miss Thusa said, "always came