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Is all that nothing? Did you ever live on an island with the child-angel? Did you ever make a raft for her and fly? Did you ever float down a river current between banks burned black by raging fires, feeding her, soothing her, comforting her, and all the while feeling in a general fever about her? You hauled her out of a crater, did you? By Jove! And what of that?
Therefore I directed the guides to take down Ethel in a chair, while I carried down the child-angel. They had to carry her down over the lava blocks, but I went to a part of the cone where it was all loose sand, and went down flying. I was at the bottom a full half hour before the others.
"We must go now," and she hastily took up her shawl and bonnet. Just then Mrs. Fairfield entered with the visitors, and began making excuses for inattention to Miss Digby, whose identity with Leonard's child-angel she had not yet learned. Helen received these apologies with her usual sweetness. "Nay," she said, "your son and I are such old friends, how could you stand on ceremony with me?"
In a moment of thoughtlessness I have allowed myself to forget the horrible position in which I am. But now I recall it. I'll crush down my feelings, and be a man again. I'll see the child-angel once more; once more feast my soul over her sweet and exquisite loveliness; once more get a glance from her tender, innocent, and guileless eyes, and then away to South America."
But suddenly it seemed to her that there stood on the threshold a beautiful young form, as beautiful as the count's child, and this apparition said to her, "The world is passing away; hold fast to me, for you are my mother after all; you have an angel in heaven, hold me fast;" and the child-angel stretched out his hand and seized her.
The girls were quite merry, appeared to be enchanted with their ride up the cone, enjoyed the novelty of the sensation, and I heard their lively chatter and their loud peals of ringing laughter, and longed more than ever to be able to speak to them. "Now the little girl that I had first seen the child-angel, you know seemed, to my amazement, to be more adventurous than the other.
"He took my child-angel from me," said Leonard, with visible emotion; "and if she had not returned, where and what should I be now? But I have forgiven him. No, I have never met him since." "And that terrible Mr. Burley?" "Poor, poor Burley! He, too, is vanished out of my present life.
Aileen was a little sylph, a pretty child-angel, white-winged and innocent, who lived in a circle of convent thoughts, knowing nothing of the world, and had fallen in love with him as the first man who had ever made love to her.
If her heart were left to itself, it would fly to me like a little tame bird, and I would cherish it forever; but now she sees sin in every innocent, womanly thought, poor little dear child-angel that she is!"
"Now, as I stood there, I suddenly heard a wild proposal from the child-angel. "'Oh, Ethel, she said, 'I've a great mind to go up " Here Hawbury interrupted his friend: "What's that? Was that her friend's name?" he asked, with some animation. "Ethel? odd, too. Ethel? H'm. Ethel? Brunette, was she?" "Yes." "Odd, too; infernally odd. But, pooh! what rot!
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