One day, when the watchful nurse could not forbear to weep—­her full heart overflowing—­her patient asked: 

“Do you think I shall not get better?  I do not feel very ill—­only weak.”

“But your mind, Caroline; your mind is crushed; your heart is broken; you have been left so desolate.”

“I sometimes think if an abundant gush of happiness came on me, I could revive yet.”

“You love me, Caroline?”

“Inexpressibly.  I sometimes feel as if I could almost grow to your heart.”

“Then, if you love me so, it will be neither shock nor pain for you to know that you are my own child.”

“Mrs. Pryor!  That is—­that means—­you have adopted me?”

“It means that I am your true mother.”

“But Mrs. James Helstone—­but my father’s wife, whom I do not remember to have seen, she is my mother?”

“She is your mother,” Mrs. Pryor assured her.  “James Helstone was my husband.”

“Is what I hear true?  Is it no dream?  My own mother!  And one I can be so fond of!  If you are my mother, the world is all changed to me.”

The offspring nestled to the parent, who gathered her to her bosom, covered her with noiseless kisses, and murmured love over her like a cushat fostering its young.

IV.—­An Old Acquaintance

An uncle of Shirley Keeldar, Sympson by name, now came with his family to stay at Feidhead, and accompanying them, as tutor to a crippled son Harry, was Louis Moore, Robert’s younger brother.

“Shirley,” said Caroline one day as they sat in the summer-house, “you are a singular being.  I thought I knew you quite well; I begin to find myself mistaken.  Did you know that my cousin Louis was tutor in your uncle’s family before the Sympsons came down here?”

“Yes, of course; I knew it well.”

“How chanced it that you never mentioned it to me?” asked Caroline.  “You knew Mrs. Pryor was my mother, and were silent, and now here again is another secret.”

“I never made it a secret; you never asked me who Henry’s tutor was, or I would have told you.”

“I am puzzled about more things than one in this matter.  You don’t like poor Louis—­why?  Do you wish that Robert’s brother were more highly placed?”

“Robert’s brother, indeed!” was the exclamation in a tone of scorn, and, with a movement of proud impatience, Shirley snatched a rose from a branch peeping through the open lattice.  “Robert’s brother!  Robert’s brother is a topic on which you and I shall quarrel if we discuss it often; so drop it henceforth and for ever.”

She would have understood the meaning of that outburst better if she had heard a conversation in the schoolroom a few days later between Louis Moore and Shirley.