"The dear child knew me again, the moment I spoke to her.

Kitty's recovery is only a matter of time." He staggered back--with a livid change in his face startling to see.
The mischief done by Mrs.Presty's sense of injury had led already to serious results.

If the thought in Linley, at that moment, had shaped itself into words, he would have said, "And Catherine never told me of it!" How bitterly he thought of the woman who had left him in suspense--how gratefully he felt toward the woman who had lightened his heart of the heaviest burden ever laid on it! Innocent of all suspicion of the feeling that she had aroused, Sydney blamed her own want of discretion as the one cause of the change that she perceived in him.

"How thoughtless, how cruel of me," she said, "not to have been more careful in telling you the good news! Pray forgive me." "You thoughtless! you cruel!" At the bare idea of her speaking in that way of herself, his sense of what he owed to her defied all restraint.
He seized her hands and covered them with grateful kisses.

"Dear Sydney! dear, good Sydney!" She drew back from him; not abruptly, not as if she felt offended.