she should regain the position from which his
opinions had excluded her. To a limited
extent, therefore, the proffered civilities were
accepted. Amongst other results of this
change was an intimacy gradually formed
between my mother and the banker's wife.
Of five children there now survived to this
lady but one—the little Amelia, god-daughter
of the countess. There was something in my
mother's disposition and manner peculiarly
grateful to a mourner's heart, and this
quality was the bond between herself and
Mrs. Latham. In due time, Amelia was
permitted to interchange visits with Cyril and
myself, and we became constant playmates.
It was soon plain to me that Cyril was the
little lady's favourite. He was then nine;
she was more than a year his junior. Yet
her beauty was even then striking, and Cyril's
sense of it sufficiently vivid to account for
her preference. Her complexion was of the
clearest olive. Her dark eyes had an intense
expression of truth and tenderness. Her
figure was lithe and graceful, and there was
a demure quiet in her manner which seemed
to temper the rare susceptibility of her look.

It was not without a pang that I who had
hitherto been Cyril's twin companion found
myself gradually supplanted. He was never
unkind, but I felt that I was no longer a need
to him. If I joined in the little dramas which
he was so fond of improvising, I was sure to
be cast for the parts of the evil magician, or
the ogress, or the implacable queen, while
Amelia was invariably the enchanted princess,
or the beautiful captive, and Cyril the knightly
deliverer. He was accustomed to sketch
these dramatic characters with his pencil, and
I was sometimes keenly pained by the very
inferior personal attractions assigned to me.
He could not understand why I should be
grieved, since he had always a kiss and a
smile for me. Yet when he wound his arm
around the little stranger, and strolled with
her under the limes, I felt somehow as if I
had better not walk there, and I could not
bear him to say, "Come, Lucy, we will let
you!" That  hurt me much.

About this time, Cyril was seized with a
fever so prostrating that for days we despaired
of his recovery. He was scarcely himself
again when our dear mother fell dangerously
ill. She had nursed her sick boy with a
devoted love which, indeed, he well repaid, and
her anxiety had developed very serious
symptoms of a latent malady. Yet our prayers
and tears seemed to prevail. She was restored
to us, though slowly.

I am not sure that this period of my
mother's convalescence was not the happiest in
my whole childhood. It was such joy to mark
the gradual stages of her recovery—first, the
pillowed chair in her bed-room; next, the
transition to the library; then, to the garden-
parlour, with the window partly open to
admit the summer air; finally, to the garden
and the lime-walk. Nature itself seemed
glad of her recovery. She had left us for her
sick room in an ungenial spring. She came
back to us in the festival of flowers, with rich,
light, warm breezes, and sweet odours. My
father's joy, beneath which an inner hope
stirred like sap, shed a new influence on our
life. We trusted, too, not only that the danger
but that the cause of disease had been
vanquished. The sudden faintness and the keen
spasm had ceased to warn us by how frail a
tenure we held our dear one.

One lovely Sunday evening my mother,
Cyril, the little Amelia, and myself had been
to the evening service at Lea church, a
distance of two miles. We had heard from one
whose pure life was the comment on his
doctrine, those truths which point to the immortal
future, and which seem never so affecting
as when addressed to the lowly or secluded
villager.

How minutely all that belongs to that
evening revives for me now—the golden rays
that poured through the mellow twilight of
the church, glancing on the minister's white
head, then slanting abruptly from the pulpit,
like a broken sun-spear, bronzing the dusky
pews, tipping Cyril's curls, and the purple
ribbon of Amelia's hat, and finally flowing
across the aisle in a rill of glory. Years after,
Cyril's pencil reproduced the scene.

The church-yard comes back to me dotted
with the returning villagers—the peasant
patriarch with his hale, cheerful look; the
village belle for the time serious, nor heedful
of the swain, blue-coated and yellow-vested,
who with bashful longing, followed her afar.
I hear my mother's gentle voice in talk with
some rural grand-dame. I see her smile
which more than repays the cottage-girl for
her offered roses—those roses which, wandering
from the near garden, shunned not the
domain of death.

With light hearts we trip over the stile into
the lane festooned with convolvulus and
honeysuckle. Like the bees that part from that
flower yet return tempted by its sweetness,
we children dart on before my mother, soon
to cluster round her again. How young she
looks! How blithely she talks! What
makes her so happy to-night? Is it the words
of solace which she has heard—the luxuriant
beauty of the lane, and the purpling glow of
the uplands; or is it a sense of that peace
which she has watched slowly dawning on
my father's mind?

The lane now opens on meadows that skirt
the river, and on the bank my father comes to
meet us. There was something almost
infantile in the wife's reception of her husband.
She marked the new welcome smile on his
face, and sprang to meet him with
outstretched hands. Though the evening was
sultry, she walked on rapidly and with a kind
of buoyant exultation. It was some time
before, at my father's request, her pace slackened.
By degrees her quick, cheerful tones
subsided into a low, sweet utterance, and