reading and talking to him; but as yet not a single allusion had
been made to the frightful secret.

At length he was so much better that there was no longer need for
anyone to sit up with him; but then Helen had her bed put in the
dressing-room, that at one o'clock she might be by his side, to sit
there until three should be well over and gone.

Thus she gave up her whole life to him, and doubtless thereby gained
much fresh interest in it for herself. But the weight of the secret,
and the dread of the law, were too much for her, and were gradually
undermining that strength of dissimulation in which she had trusted,
and which, in respect of cheerfulness, she had to exercise towards
her brother as well as her aunt. She struggled hard, for if those
weak despairing eyes of his were to encounter weakness and despair
in hers, madness itself would be at the door for both. She had come
nearly to the point of discovering that the soul is not capable of
generating its own requirements, that it needs to be supplied from a
well whose springs lie deeper than its own soil, in the infinite
All, namely, upon which that soil rests. Happy they who have found
that those springs have an outlet in their hearts--on the hill of
prayer.

It was very difficult to lay her hands on reading that suited him.
Gifted with a glowing yet delicate eastern imagination, pampered and
all but ruined, he was impatient of narratives of common life, whose
current bore him to a reservoir and no sea; while, on the other
hand, some tales that seemed to Helen poverty-stricken flats of
nonsense, or jumbles of false invention, would in her brother wake
an interest she could not understand, appearing to afford him