e eyes are far more pensive, and that
her merry laugh is now never heard. In that luxurious home, fostered
with the tenderest care by its charming owner, the romance of her
childhood realised, and Lionel by her side, she misses the old crippled
vagrant. And therefore it is that her merry laugh is no longer heard!
"Ah!" said Lionel, softly breaking the pause at length, "do not turn
your eyes from me, or I shall think that there are tears in them!"
Sophy's breast heaved, but her eyes were averted still. Lionel rose
gently, and came to the other side of her quiet form. "Fie! there are
tears, and you would hide them from me. Ungrateful!"

Sophy looked at him now with candid, inexpressible, guileless affection
in those swimming eyes, and said with touching sweetness: "Ungrateful!
Should I not be so if I were gay and happy?"

And in self-reproach for not being sufficiently unhappy while that young
consoler was by her side, she too rose, left the arbour, and looked
wistfully along the river. George Morley was expected; he might bring
tidings of the absent. And now while Lionel, rejoining her, exerts all
his eloquence to allay her anxiety and encourage her hopes, and while
they thus, in that divinest stage of love, ere the tongue repeats
what the eyes have told, glide along-here in sunlight by lingering
flowers--there in shadow under mournful willows, whose leaves are ever
the latest to fall, let us explain by what links of circumstance Sophy
became the great lady's guest, and Waife once more a homeless wanderer.

CHAPTER III.

COMPRISING MANY NEEDFUL EXPLANATIONS ILLUSTRATIVE OF WISE SAWS; AS
FOR EXAMPLE, "HE THAT HATH AN ILL NAME IS HALF HANGED." "HE THAT
HATH BEEN BITTEN BY A SERPENT IS AFRAID OF A ROPE." "HE THAT LOOKS
FOR A STAR PUTS OUT HIS CANDLES;" AND, "WHEN GOD WILLS, ALL WINDS
BRING RAIN."

The reader has been already made aware how, by an impulse of womanhood
and humanity, Arabella Crane had been converted from a persecuting into
a tutelary agent in the destinies of Waife and Sophy. That evolution
in her moral being dated from the evening on which she had sought the
cripple's retreat, to warn him of Jasper's designs. We have seen by
what stratagem she had made it appear that Waife and his grandchild had
sailed beyond the reach of molestation; with what liberality she had
advanced the money that freed Sophy from the manager's claim; and how
considerately she had empowered her agent to give t