ghton was
right, and I respect her."

"Quite right. If I lived to the age of Methuselah, I could not paint a
head like Frank Vance."

"And even he is not famous yet. Never heard of him."

"He will be famous: I am sure of it; and if you lived in London, you
would hear of him even now. Oh, sir! such a portrait as he painted
the other day! But I must tell you all about it." And therewith Lionel
plunged at once, medias res, into the brief broken epic of little Sophy,
and the eccentric infirm Belisarius for whose sake she first toiled and
then begged; with what artless eloquence he brought out the colours of
the whole story,--now its humour, now its pathos; with what beautifying
sympathy he adorned the image of the little vagrant girl, with her
mien of gentlewoman and her simplicity of child; the river excursion to
Hampton Court; her still delight; how annoyed he felt when Vance seemed
ashamed of her before those fine people; the orchard scene in which
he had read Darrell's letter, that, for the time, drove her from the
foremost place in his thoughts; the return home, the parting, her
wistful look back, the visit to the Cobbler's next day; even her
farewell gift, the nursery poem, with the lines written on the fly-leaf,
he had them by heart! Darrell, the grand advocate, felt he could not
have produced on a jury, with those elements, the effect which that
boy-narrator produced on his granite self.

"And, oh, sir!" cried Lionel, checking his horse, and even arresting
Darrell's with bold right hand--"oh," said he, as he brought his moist
and pleading eyes in full battery upon the shaken fort to which he had
mined his way--"oh, sir! you are so wise and rich and kind, do rescue
that poor child from the penury and hardships of such a life! If you
could but have seen and heard her! She could never have been born to it!
You look away: I offend you! I have no right to tax your benevolence
for others; but, instead of showering favours upon me, so little would
suffice for her!--if she were but above positive want, with that old man
(she would not be happy without him), safe in such a cottage as you give
to your own peasants! I am a man, or shall be one soon; I can wrestle
with the world, and force my way somehow; but that delicate child, a
village show, or a beggar on the high road!--no mother, no brother, no
one but that broken-down cripple, leaning upon her arm as his crutch. I
cannot bear to think of it. I am sure I shall meet h