"The affair is concluded," said my Lady.
"Concluded. You will find the duties very
light, Mr. Silverman. Charming house; charming
little garden, orchard, and all that. You
will be able to take pupils. By the bye!—No.
I will return to the word afterwards. What
was I going to mention, when it put me out?"

My Lady stared at me, as if I knew. And I
didn't know. And that perplexed me afresh.

Said my Lady, after some consideration:
"Oh! Of course. How very dull of me! The
last incumbent—least mercenary man I ever
saw—in consideration of the duties being so
light and the house so delicious, couldn't rest,
he said, unless I permitted him to help me with
my correspondence, accounts, and various little
things of that kind; nothing in themselves, but
which it worries a lady to cope with. Would Mr.
Silverman also, like to—? Or shall I—?"

I hastened to say that my poor help would be
always at her ladyship's service.

"I am absolutely blessed," said my Lady,
casting up her eyes (and so taking them off of
me for one moment), "in having to do with
gentlemen who cannot endure an approach to
the idea of being mercenary!" She shivered at
the word. "And now as to the pupil."

"The—?" I was quite at a loss.

"Mr. Silverman, you have no idea what she
is. She is," said my Lady, laying her touch
upon my coat sleeve, " I do verily believe, the
most extraordinary girl in this world. Already
knows more Greek and Latin than Lady Jane
Grey. And taught herself! Has not yet,
remember, derived a moment's advantage from
Mr. Silverman's classical acquirements. To say
nothing of mathematics, which she is bent
upon becoming versed in, and in which (as I
hear from my son and others) Mr. Silverman's
reputation is so deservedly high!"

Under my Lady's eyes, I must have lost
the clue, I felt persuaded; and yet I did not
know where I could have dropped it.

"Adelina," said my Lady, "is my only
daughter. If I did not feel quite convinced that
I am not blinded by a mother's partiality;
unless I was absolutely sure that when you
know her, Mr. Silverman, you will esteem it a
high and unusual privilege to direct her studies;
I should introduce a mercenary element
into this conversation, and ask you on what
terms—"

I entreated my Lady to go no further. My
Lady saw that I was troubled, and did me the
honour to comply with my request.

EIGHTH CHAPTER.

EVERYTHING in mental acquisition that her
brother might have been, if he would; and
everything in all gracious charms and admirable
qualities that no one but herself could be;
this was Adelina.

I will not expatiate upon her beauty. I will
not expatiate upon her intelligence, her quickness
of perception, her powers of memory, her
sweet consideration from the first moment for
the slow-paced tutor who ministered to her
wonderful gifts. I was thirty then; I am over
sixty now; she is ever present to me in these
hours as she was in those, bright and beautiful
and young, wise and fanciful and good.

When I discovered that I loved her, how can
I say. In the first day? In the first week?
In the first month? Impossible to trace. If
I be (as I am) unable to represent to myself
any previous period of my life as quite separable
from her attracting power, how can I answer
for this one detail!

Whensoever I made the discovery, it laid a
heavy burden on me. And yet, comparing it
with the far heavier burden that I afterwards
took up, it does not seem to me, now, to have
been very hard to bear. In the knowledge
that I did love her, and that I should love her
while my life lasted, and that I was ever to hide
my secret deep in my own breast, and she was
never to find it, there was a kind of sustaining
joy, or pride, or comfort, mingled with my
pain.

But later on—say a year later on—when I
made another discovery, then indeed my suffering
and my struggle were strong. That other
discovery was—?

These words will never see the light, if ever,
until my heart is dust; until her bright spirit
has returned to the regions of which, when
imprisoned here, it surely retained some unusual
glimpse of remembrance; until all the pulses
that ever beat around us shall have long been
quiet; until all the fruits of all the tiny victories
and defeats achieved in our little breasts shall
have withered away. That discovery was, that
she loved me.

She may have enhanced my knowledge, and
loved me for that; she may have overvalued
my discharge of duty to her, and loved me for
that; she may have refined upon a playful
compassion which she would sometimes show for
what she called my want of wisdom according
to the light of the world's dark lanterns, and
loved me for that; she may—she must—have
confused the borrowed light of what I had only
learned, with its brightness in its pure original
rays; but she loved me at that time, and she
made me know it.

Pride of family and pride of wealth put me
as far off from her in my Lady's eyes as if I had
been some domesticated creature of another
kind. But they could not put me further from
her than I put myself when I set my merits
against hers. More than that. They could not
put me, by millions of fathoms, half so low
beneath her as I put myself when in imagination
I took advantage of her noble trustfulness,
took the fortune that I knew she must possess
in her own right, and left her to find herself in
the zenith of her beauty and genius, bound to
poor rusty plodding Me.

No. Worldliness should not enter here, at
any cost. If I had tried to keep it out of other
ground, how much harder was I bound to try to
keep it from this sacred place.

But there was something daring in her broad
generous character that demanded at so delicate
a crisis to be delicately and patiently addressed.
After many and many a bitter night (O I found