outlooks into regions to her unknown. But from the moral element in
any story he shrunk visibly. She tried the German tales collected by
the brothers Grimm, so popular with children of all ages; but on the
very first attempt she blundered into an awful one of murder and
vengeance, in which, if the drawing was untrue, the colour was
strong, and had to blunder clumsily out of it again, with a hot face
and a cold heart. At length she betook herself to the Thousand and
One Nights, which she had never read, and found very dull, but which
with Leopold served for what book could do.

In the rest of the house things went on much the same. Old friends
and their daughters called on Mrs. Ramshorn, and inquired after the
invalid, and George Bascombe came almost every Saturday, and stayed
till Monday. But the moment the tide of her trouble began again to
rise, Helen found herself less desirous of meeting one from whom she
could hope neither help nor cheer. It might be that future
generations of the death-doomed might pass their poor life a little
more comfortably that she had not been a bad woman, and she might be
privileged to pass away from the world, as George taught her,
without earning the curses of those that came after her; but there
was her precious brother lying before her with a horrible worm
gnawing at his heart, and what to her were a thousand generations
unborn! Rather with Macbeth she might well "wish the estate o' the
world were now undone"--most of all when, in the silent watches of
the night, as she sat by the bedside of her beloved and he slept,
his voice would come murmuring out of a dream, sounding so far away
that it seemed as if his spirit only and not his lips had spoken the
words, "Oh Helen, darling, give me my knife. Why will you not let me
die?"