Of course everybody at the Institute was full of the terrible adventure of the preceding evening.  Mr. Bernard felt poorly enough; but he had made it a point to show himself the next morning, as if nothing had happened.  Helen Darley knew nothing of it all until she had risen, when the gossipy matron of the establishment made her acquainted with all its details, embellished with such additional ornamental appendages as it had caught up in transmission from lip to lip.  She did not love to betray her sensibilities, but she was pale and tremulous and very nearly tearful when Mr. Bernard entered the sitting-room, showing on his features traces of the violent shock he had received and the heavy slumber from which he had risen with throbbing brows.  What the poor girl’s impulse was, on seeing him, we need not inquire too curiously.  If he had been her own brother, she would have kissed him and cried on his neck; but something held her back.  There is no galvanism in kiss-your-brother; it is copper against copper:  but alien bloods develop strange currents, when they flow close to each other, with only the films that cover lip and cheek between them.  Mr. Bernard, as some of us may remember, violated the proprieties and laid himself open to reproach by his enterprise with a bouncing village-girl, to whose rosy cheek an honest smack was not probably an absolute novelty.  He made it all up by his discretion and good behavior now.  He saw by Helen’s moist eye and trembling lip that her woman’s heart was off its guard, and he knew, by the infallible instinct of sex, that he should be forgiven, if he thanked her for her sisterly sympathies in the most natural way,—­expressive, and at the same time economical of breath and utterance.  He would not give a false look to their friendship by any such demonstration.  Helen was a little older than he was, but the aureole of young womanhood had not yet begun to fade from around her.  She was surrounded by that enchanted atmosphere into which the girl walks with dreamy eyes, and out of which the woman passes with a story written on her forehead.  Some people think very little of these refinements; they have not studied magnetism, and the law of the square of the distance.

So Mr. Bernard thanked Helen for her interest without the aid of the twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet,—­the love labial,—­the limping consonant which it takes two to speak plain.  Indeed, he scarcely let her say a word, at first; for he saw that it was hard for her to conceal her emotion.  No wonder; he had come within a hair’s-breadth of losing his life, and he had been a very kind friend and a very dear companion to her.

There were some curious spiritual experiences connected with his last evening’s adventure, which were working very strongly in his mind.  It was borne in upon him irresistibly that he had been dead since he had seen Helen,—­as dead as the son of the Widow of Nain before the bier was touched and he sat up and began to speak.  There was an interval between two conscious moments which appeared to him like a temporary annihilation, and the thoughts it suggested were worrying him with strange perplexities.