For the clear blue of her eye and the lofty purity of her brow seemed to tell of a spirit whose beauty far exceeded that of its temple, and the brightness of the glance and the sweetness of the smile warmed the heart in her behalf as regular outline and perfect contour are seldom known to do.  Happiness, too, is a crowning charm to any woman, and Lilian was deeply and contentedly happy:  a smile perpetually played in the little, half-guessed dimples at the corners of her mouth, and her wide clear eyes were full of peace.  No; though years should rob Lilian of bloom, it was plain that they could but add fresh charms to her soul; and Lilian’s lover must needs love her soul.

She was to be married in a couple of years—­her mother would not hear of it at present—­to one who had been her lover from her cradle, and who loved her with a tender and devoted passion, who thought her embodied loveliness, and who would have made any sacrifice, even to death, for her welfare.  She had seemed to him from the hour when he first saw her—­a blue-eyed, rosy child with an aureole of palest yellow hair—­a being not made of clay—­something remote and different as the angels are; and when he first discovered that he loved her he had felt momentarily as if he committed a sacrilege, and though he lost that sensation soon enough, she always, seemed to him a holy and perfect thing.  The only cloud that crossed her sky now was sometimes when this passion of Sterling’s oppressed her or constrained her, and made her feel that her love was less than his.

Sterling was in the first flush of manhood, some half dozen years her senior—­a hazel-eyed, bright-haired Saxon, and a noble, upright fellow:  he was as prosperous in his fortunes as he had a right to expect, for his father had established him in a good business, and with suitable thrift and care there was no reason why he should not succeed.  His father was a man of such strict adherence to theory that he allowed the boy, as he still called him, only the same chance that he himself had had:  he lent him his capital and exacted a rigid payment of the interest.  “John shall share my fortune equally with Helen and his mother,” Mr. Sterling used to say, “when he has shown me that he deserves it and can double it.”  And John, sure that any theory of his father’s was as right as a law of the universe, was only anxious to keep the warm affection that he knew lay behind the stern principle.

He lived with Lilian’s mother, whom he had persuaded, when she found it necessary to make exertion, to come to the city and rent a house there for himself and two or three of his friends.  He meant to take the house off her hands as soon as he was able to afford so large an expenditure, and meantime he did all he could to help her render it attractive and homelike.  If it was not yet all they wished, or all he intended it should be, he knew that they were young, and felt that they could wait; and he said as much to Lilian