And the silence was so deep and so sweet! Neither had yet said to the
other a word of love. And in that silence both felt that they loved and
were beloved. Sophy! how childlike she looked still! How little she is
changed!--except that the soft blue eyes are far more pensive, and that
her merry laugh is now never heard. In that luxurious home, fostered
with the tenderest care by its charming owner, the romance of her
childhood realised, and Lionel by her side, she misses the old crippled
vagrant. And therefore it is that her merry laugh is no longer heard!
"Ah!" said Lionel, softly breaking the pause at length, "do not turn your
eyes from me, or I shall think that there are tears in them!" Sophy's
breast heaved, but her eyes were averted still. Lionel rose gently, and
came to the other side of her quiet form. "Fie! there are tears, and you
would hide them from me. Ungrateful!"

Sophy looked at him now with candid, inexpressible, guileless affection
in those swimming eyes, and said with touching sweetness: "Ungrateful!
Should I not be so if I were gay and happy?"

And in self-reproach for not being sufficiently unhappy while that young
consoler was by her side, she too rose, left the arbour, and looked
wistfully along the river. George Morley was expected; he might bring
tidings of the absent. And now while Lionel, rejoining her, exerts all
his eloquence to allay her anxiety and encourage her hopes, and while
they thus, in that divinest stage of love, ere the tongue repeats what
the eyes have told, glide along-here in sunlight by lingering flowers-
there in shadow under mournful willows, whose leaves are ever the latest
to fall, let us explain by what links of circumstance Sophy became the
great lady's guest, and Waife once more a homeless wanderer.