“What! is a lovely young creature, almost equal to what I was before my cruel malady, to waste her bloom on a wretched old melancholic, who will not so much as look at her!”

“Harriet, I cannot hear this—­you know not of what you are talking!  What is my poor skin-deep beauty—­if beauty it be—­compared with the stores of goodness and wisdom I find in him?”

“La! child, what heat is this?  One would really think you loved him.”

“Of course I do!  I love and honour him more than any one I ever met—­ except my dear father.”

“Come, Aura, you are talking by rote out of the marriage service.  You may be open with me, you know, it will go no further; and I do long to know whether you can be truly content at heart,” said Harriet with real affection.

“Dear sister,” said Aurelia, touched, “believe me that indeed I am.  Mr. Belamour is kindness itself.  He is all he ever promised to be to me, and sometimes more.”

“Yet if he loved you, he could never let you live moped up there.  Are you never frighted at the dark chamber?  I should die of it!”

“The dark does not fright me,” said Aurelia.

“You have a courage I have not!  Come, now, were you never frighted to talk with a voice in the dark?”

“Scarcely ever!” said aurelia.

“Scarcely—­when was that?”

“You will laugh, Harriet, but it is when he is most—­most tender and full of warmth.  Then I hardly know him for the same.”

“What!  If he be not always tender to my poor dear child, he must be a wretch indeed.”

“O no, no, Harriet!  How shall I ever make you understand?” cried Aurelia.  “Never for a moment is he other than kind and gentle.  It is generally like a father, only more courtly and deferential, but sometimes something seems to come over him, and he is—­oh!  I cannot tell you—­what I should think a lover would be,” faltered Aurelia, colouring crimson, and hiding her face on her sister’s shoulder, as old habits of confidence, and need of counsel and sympathy were obliterating all the warnings of last night.

“You silly little chit!  Why don’t you encourage these advances?  You ought to be charmed, not frightened.”

“They would ch—–­I should like it if it were not so like two men in one, the one holding the other back.”

Harriet laughed at this fancy, and Aurelia was impelled to defend it.  “Indeed, Harriet, it is really so.  There will be whispers—­oh, such whispers!”—­she sunk her voice and hid her face again—­“close to my ear, and—­endearments—­while the grave voice sounds at the other end of the room, and then I long for light.  I swooned for fright the first time, but I am much more used to it now.”

“This is serious,” said Harriet, with unwonted gravity.  “Do you really think that there is another person in the room?”

“I do not feel as if it could be otherwise, and yet it is quite impossible.”