"So changed! I have so often pictured it to myself, never, never like
this; yet I loved it, commonplace as it was to my recollection; and the
garret, and the tree in the carpenter's yard."

She did not give these thoughts utterance. And they now entered the
garden.




CHAPTER IV.

Mrs. Fairfield was a proud woman when she received Mrs. Riccabocca and
Violante in her grand house; for a grand house to her was that cottage to
which her boy Lenny had brought her home. Proud, indeed, ever was Widow
Fairfield; but she thought then in her secret heart, that if ever she
could receive in the drawing-room of that grand house the great Mrs.
Hazeldean, who had so lectured her for refusing to live any longer in the
humble, tenement rented of the squire, the cup of human bliss would be
filled, and she could content edly die of the pride of it. She did not
much notice Helen,--her attention was too absorbed by the ladies who
renewed their old acquaintance with her, and she carried them all over
the house, yea, into the very kitchen; and so, somehow or other, there
was a short time when Helen and Leonard found themselves alone. It was
in the study. Helen had unconsciously seated herself in Leonard's own
chair, and she was gazing with anxious and wistful interest on the
scattered papers, looking so disorderly (though, in truth, in that
disorder there was method, but method only known to the owner), and at
the venerable well-worn books, in all languages, lying on the floor, on