always held him in a place apart:  she loved him far better than she loved her strict, stern father; he was a portion of herself; her universe revolved around him; she had never formed a fancy of what life and the world would be without him; and much as she worshiped Lilian, she had more than once doubted if she were altogether worthy of John—­not because she was Lilian, but because he was John.  She used to watch Lilian sometimes when John’s friends came in in the evening—­used to watch her and admire her flushing face, her perfect toilette, her gracious manner; but used to wonder if all betrothed women treated their lovers’ friends so exactly as they did their lovers, with that same unchanging courtesy and gentle sweetness.  Once she saw the manner vary:  it was while she herself was singing to them all, facing down the room, and John held his pawn suspended in the crisis of a game of chess, while Mr. Reyburn walked familiarly up and down, now turning the music for her, now bending with a word in Lilian’s ear, now joining in the burden of the song: 

  As fair art thou, my bonnie lass,
    So deep in luve am I;
  And I will luve thee still, my dear,
    Till a’ the seas gang dry—­
  Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,
    And the rocks melt wi’ the sun.

“What a being Burns was!” interrupted John, without looking up.  “How precisely he knew my feelings toward any one who would show me how to escape this checkmate!” And Lilian sprang to her feet, upsetting her workbasket, and ran to him and commenced talking hurriedly, while Mr. Reyburn, whose eyes had been resting on her face for some time, kept on singing after Helen ceased—­

  Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,
    And the rocks melt wi’ the sun.

And Helen, child as she was, looking at him and listening to him, recognized a veiled meaning in the tone of the singing, and thought she hated the singer.

That night, when all the others had gone, and Lilian’s mother was folding her work, and John was locking a window, and Helen closing the piano, she saw Mr. Reyburn stoop over Lilian’s hand as he said good-night—­stoop low, and press his lips upon its dimpled back.  In after years Helen might recall his manner of that moment and understand it, half reverence, half passion, as it was, but now she only saw Lilian turn white and tremble, and clasp her hand over her eyes in a bewildered way when he had gone to his rooms on the other side of the hall, and walk up stairs as though she feared to rouse an echo.

“Oh, Lilian,” said Helen, following her into her mother’s room, “how dared he kiss your hand?  How dared he look at you so while he sang?  I hate him!”

“Hush, child,” said Lilian gently, almost solemnly.  And Helen, remembering who Lilian was, and the deep friendship between her brother and the other, felt as if she had committed an unpardonable sin, and crept away to bed, and did not see the man again during the short remainder of her stay.