head like Frank Vance."

"And even he is not famous yet. Never heard of him."

"He will be famous: I am sure of it; and if you lived in London, you
would hear of him even now. Oh, sir! such a portrait as he painted the
other day! But I must tell you all about it." And therewith Lionel
plunged at once, medias res, into the brief broken epic of little Sophy,
and the eccentric infirm Belisarius for whose sake she first toiled and
then begged; with what artless eloquence he brought out the colours of
the whole story,--now its humour, now its pathos; with what beautifying
sympathy he adorned the image of the little vagrant girl, with her mien
of gentlewoman and her simplicity of child; the river excursion to
Hampton Court; her still delight; how annoyed he felt when Vance seemed
ashamed of her before those fine people; the orchard scene in which he
had read Darrell's letter, that, for the time, drove her from the
foremost place in his thoughts; the return home, the parting, her wistful
look back, the visit to the Cobbler's next day; even her farewell gift,
the nursery poem, with the lines written on the fly-leaf, he had them by
heart! Darrell, the grand advocate, felt he could not have produced on a
jury, with those elements, the effect which that boy-narrator produced on
his granite self.

"And, oh, sir!" cried Lionel, checking his horse, and even arresting
Darrell's with bold right hand--"oh," said he, as he brought his moist
and pleading eyes in full battery upon the shaken fort to which he had
mined his way--"oh, sir! you are so wise and rich and kind, do rescue
that poor child from the penury and hardships of such a life! If you
could but have seen and heard her! She could never have been born to it!
You look away: I offend you! I have no right to tax your benevolence for