rcumstance?"

"I have learned that she has just made her will."

"Made her will?"

The tutor and pupil were silent.

"She told you that?" asked Moore, when some minutes had elapsed.

"She told me quite cheerfully, not as an ominous circumstance, which I
felt it to be. She said I was the only person besides her solicitor,
Pearson Hall, and Mr. Helstone and Mr. Yorke, who knew anything about
it; and to me, she intimated, she wished specially to explain its
provisions."

"Go on, Harry."

"'Because,' she said, looking down on me with her beautiful eyes--oh!
they _are_ beautiful, Mr. Moore! I love them! I love her! She is my
star! Heaven must not claim her! She is lovely in this world, and fitted
for this world. Shirley is not an angel; she is a woman, and she shall
live with men. Seraphs shall not have her! Mr. Moore, if one of the
'sons of God,' with wings wide and bright as the sky, blue and sounding
as the sea, having seen that she was fair, descended to claim her, his
claim should be withstood--withstood by me--boy and cripple as I am."

"Henry Sympson, go on, when I tell you."

"'Because,' she said, 'if I made no will, and died before you, Harry,
all my property would go to you; and I do not intend that it should be
so, though your father would like it. But you,' she said, 'will have his
whole estate, which is large--larger than Fieldhead. Your sisters will
have nothing; so I have left them some money, though I do not love them,
both together, half so much as I love one lock of your fair hair.' She
said these words, and she called me her 'darling,' and let me kiss her.
She went on to tell me that she had left Caroline Helstone some money
too; that this manor house, with its furniture and books, she had
bequeathed to me, as she did not choose to take the old family place
from her own blood; and that all the rest of her property, amounting to
about twelve thousand pounds, exclusive of the legacies to my sisters
and Miss Helstone, she had willed, not to me, seeing I was already rich,
but to a good man, who would make the best use of it that any human
being could do--a man, she said, that was both gentle and brave, strong
and merciful--a man that might not profess to be pious, but she knew he
had the secret of religion pure and undefiled before God. The spirit of
love and peace was with him. He visited the fatherless and widows in
their affliction, and kept himself unspotted from the world. Then she
asked, 'Do y