“Don’t trust that remembrance; don’t recall it!  I will tell you what occurred.  Some time after you had gone, and after I had recovered myself a little in my own room, I went downstairs again to see my father; for I was too terrified and too miserable at what had happened, to be alone.  He was not in his room when I got there.  As I looked round me for a moment, I saw the pieces of your page in the book about our family, scattered on the floor; and the miniature likeness of you, when you were a child, was lying among the other fragments.  It had been torn out of its setting in the paper, but not injured.  I picked it up, Basil, and put it on the table, at the place where he always sits; and laid my own little locket, with your hair in it, by the side, so that he might know that the miniature had not been accidentally taken up and put there by the servant.  Then, I gathered together the pieces of the page and took them away with me, thinking it better that he should not see them again.  Just as I had got through the door that leads into the library, and was about to close it, I heard the other door, by which you enter the study from the hall, opening; and he came in, and went directly to the table.  His back was towards me, so I could look at him unperceived.  He observed the miniature directly and stood quite still with it in his hand; then sighed—­sighed so bitterly!—­and then took the portrait of our dear mother from one of the drawers of the table, opened the case in which it is kept, and put your miniature inside, very gently and tenderly.  I could not trust myself to see any more, so I went up to my room again:  and shortly afterwards he came in with my locket, and gave it me back, only saying—­’You left this on my table, Clara.’  But if you had seen his face then, you would have hoped all things from him in the time to come, as I hope now.”

“And as I will hope, Clara, though it be from no stronger motive than gratitude to you.”

“Before I left home,” she proceeded, after a moment’s silence, “I thought of your loneliness in this strange place—­knowing that I could seldom come to see you, and then only by stealth; by committing a fault which, if my father found it out—­but we won’t speak of that!  I thought of your lonely hours here; and I have brought with me an old, forgotten companion of yours, to bear you company, and to keep you from thinking too constantly on what you have suffered.  Look, Basil! won’t you welcome this old friend again?”

She gave me a small roll of manuscript, with an effort to resume her kind smile of former days, even while the tears stood thick in her eyes.  I untied the leaves, glanced at the handwriting, and saw before me, once more, the first few chapters of my unfinished romance!  Again I looked on the patiently-laboured pages, familiar relics of that earliest and best ambition which I had abandoned for love; too faithful records of the tranquil, ennobling pleasures which I had lost for ever!  Oh, for one Thought-Flower now, from the dream-garden of the happy Past!