others. To her mother she gave no name, seemed pleased to see her, but
not sensibly to miss her when away; me she called her brother: if longer
absent than usual, me she missed. When, after the toils of the day, I
came to join her, even if she spoke not, her sweet face brightened. When
she sang, she beckoned me to come near to her, and looked at me fixedly,
with eyes ever tender, often tearful; when she drew she would pause and
glance over her shoulder to see that I was watching her, and point to the
drawings with a smile of strange significance, as if they conveyed in some
covert allegory messages meant for me; so, at least, I interpreted her
smile, and taught myself to say, "Yes, Lilian, I understand!"

And more than once, when I had so answered, she rose, and kissed my
forehead. I thought my heart would have broken when I felt that
spirit-like melancholy kiss.

And yet how marvellously the human mind teaches itself to extract
consolations from its sorrows. The least wretched of my hours were those
that I had passed in that saddened room, seeking how to establish
fragments of intercourse, invent signs, by which each might interpret
each, between the intellect I had so laboriously cultured, so arrogantly
vaunted, and the fancies wandering through the dark, deprived of their
guide in reason. It was something even of joy to feel myself needed for
her guardianship, endeared and yearned for still by some unshattered
instinct of her heart; and when, parting from her for the night, I stole
the moment in which on her soft face seemed resting least of shadow, to
ask, in a trembling whisper, "Lilian, are the angels watching over you?"
and she would answer "Yes," sometimes in words, sometimes with a
mysterious happy smile--then--then I went to my lonely room, comforted
and thankful.