'I am sure Miss May, at least, never came near us till to-day.'

'I'm very glad of it! I'm sick of everything and everybody I have
seen!'

Everybody! That was the climax! Averil just held her tongue; but
she rushed to her own room, and wept bitterly and angrily. Sick of
her after all her devotion! Leonard, the being she loved best in the
world!

And Leonard, distressed and hurt at the reception of his natural
expression of the weariness of seven weeks' sickness and sorrow, felt
above all the want of his mother's ever-ready sympathy and soothing,
and as if the whole world, here, there, and everywhere, would be an
equally dreary waste. His moment of bright anticipation passed into
heavy despondency, and turning his head from the light, he dropped
asleep with a tear on his cheek.

When he awoke it was at the sound of movements in the room, slow and
cautious, out of regard to his slumbers--and voices, likewise low--at
least one was low, the other that whisper of the inaudibility of
which Averil could not be disabused. He lay looking for a few
moments through his eyelashes, before exerting himself to move.
Averil, her face still showing signs of recent tears, sat in a low
chair, a book in her lap, talking to her brother Henry.

Henry was of less robust frame than Leonard promised to be, and
though on a smaller scale, was more symmetrically made, and had more
regular features than either his brother or sister, but his eyes were
merely quick lively black beads, without anything of the clear depths