cted a mind and breeding above his outward
condition--should come of gentle than of boorish blood.

"Then, perhaps," I said, resuming the conversation, "you would not like
to follow a trade?"

"Yes, I should. What would it matter to me? My father was a
gentleman."

"And your mother?"

And he turned suddenly round; his cheeks hot, his lips quivering: "She
is dead. I do not like to hear strangers speak about my mother."

I asked his pardon. It was plain he had loved and mourned her; and
that circumstances had smothered down his quick boyish feelings into a
man's tenacity of betraying where he had loved and mourned. I, only a
few minutes after, said something about wishing we were not "strangers."

"Do you?" The lad's half amazed, half-grateful smile went right to my
heart.

"Have you been up and down the country much?"

"A great deal--these last three years; doing a hand's turn as best I
could, in hop-picking, apple-gathering, harvesting; only this summer I
had typhus fever, and could not work."

"What did you do then?"

"I lay in a barn till I got well--I'm quite well now; you need not be
afraid."

"No, indeed; I had never thought of that."

We soon became quite sociable together. He guided me carefully out of
the town into the Abbey walk, flecked with sunshine through overhanging
trees. Once he stopped to pick up for me the large brown fan of a
horse-chestnut leaf.

"It's pretty, isn't it?--only it shows that autumn is come."

"And how shall you live in the winter, when there is no out-of-door
work to be had?"

"I don't know."

The lad's countenance fell, and that hungry, weary look, which had
vanished while we talked, returned more painfully than ever. I
reproached myself for having, under the influence of his merry talk,
temporarily forgotten it.

"Ah!" I cried eagerly, when we left the shade of the Abbey trees, and
crossed the street; "here we are, at home!"

"Are you?" The homeless lad just glanced at it--the flight of spotless
stone-steps, guarded by ponderous railings, which led to my father's
respectable and handsome door. "Good day, then--which means good-bye."

I started. The word pained me. On my sad, lonely life--brief indeed,
though ill health seemed to have doubled and trebled my sixteen years
into a mournful maturity--this lad's face had come like a flash of
sunshine; a reflection of the merry boyhood, the youth and strength
that never were, never could be, mine. To