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.
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 the reference which secured to Waife
the asylum in which we last beheld him. In a
few stern sentences she had acquainted Waife with
her fearless inflexible resolve to associate her fate
henceforth with the life of his lawless son; and,
by rendering abortive all his evil projects of plunder,
to compel him at last to depend upon her for an existence
neither unsafe nor sordid, provided only that it were
