"Nero," that was the name by which Helen had said that her father's friend had called his dog. And the sound startled Leonard as he leant, sick at heart, against the stone, he lifted his head and looked wistfully, eagerly, into Harley's face. Those eyes, bright, clear, yet so strangely deep and absent, which Helen had described, met his own, and chained them. For L'Estrange halted also; the boy's countenance was not unfamiliar to him. He returned the inquiring look fixed on his own, and recognized the student by the book-stall.
"The dog is quite harmless, sir," said L'Estrange, with a smile.
"And you called him Nero?" said Leonard, still gazing on the stranger.
Harley mistook the drift of the question.
"Nero, sir; but he is free from the sanguinary propensities of his Roman namesake." Harley was about to pass on, when Leonard said falteringly,--
"Pardon me, but can it be possible that you are one whom I have sought in vain, on behalf of the child of Captain Digby?"
Harley stopped short. "Digby!" he exclaimed, "where is he? He should have found me easily. I gave him an address."
"Ah, Heaven be thanked," cried Leonard. "Helen is saved; she will not die;" and he burst into tears.
A very few moments, and a very few words sufficed to explain to Harley the state of his old fellow-soldier's orphan. And Harley himself soon stood in the young sufferer's room, supporting her burning temples on his breast, and whispering into ears that heard him, as in a happy dream, "Comfort, comfort; your father yet lives in me."
And then Helen, raising her eyes, said "But Leonard is my brother--more than brother--and he needs a father's care more than I do."
"Hush, hush, Helen. I need no one--nothing now!" cried Leonard; and his tears gushed over the little hand that clasped his own.
Harley L'Estrange was a man whom all things that belong to the romantic and poetic side of our human life deeply impressed. When he came to learn the tie between these two children of nature, standing side by side, alone amidst the storms of fate, his heart was more deeply moved than it had been for many years. In those dreary attics, overshadowed by the smoke and reek of the humble suburb--the workday world in its harshest and tritest forms below and around them--he recognized that divine poem which comes out from all union between the mind and the heart. Here, on the rough deal table, (the ink scarcely dry,) lay the writings of the young wrestler for fame and bread; there, on the other side the partition, on that mean pallet, lay the boy's sole comforter--the all that warmed his heart with living mortal affection. On one side the wall, the world of imagination; on the other this world of grief and of love. And in both, a spirit equally sublime--unselfish Devotion--"the something afar from the sphere of our sorrow."