Helen as he had known her in Simla, a happy bride with everything bright before her. Now there was the lonely grave in the Afghan snow, and a sad solitary woman in widow's weeds. His deep voice was tender with pity.

'If his mother is like him I shall not be afraid of her,' Helen thought. She said she would be very glad; and, after asking her address, he shook hands and went off to rejoin his friend. Helen sat down again, and Rex, who had been standing watchfully by her all the time, put his head in her lap. Well, my king,' she said, 'what is it? You will always take great care of me, but you wish I would not talk to strangers? Thank you, dear; but I don't think he would hurt me. I think he is rather like you, big and strong and gentle.'

Gradually her thoughts drifted away again to other days and other scenes. She sat with her hand on Rex's head, gazing out over the sea; but instead of it there rose before her eyes the pine-clad mountains, with their rugged peaks and swirling clouds and glorious sunsets. She felt again the keen breeze from the snowy range, and watched the golden-headed eagles wheeling over the deep blue ravines. At last she sighed and roused herself. How low and smooth and round everything seemed here. The houses were nearly as big as the hills; and the sky-line was so close that you could almost touch it everywhere. There the houses dotted about the precipitous mountain sides looked like carved toy chalets; and you could see the plains fifty miles below you to the southward, and the white peaks cutting into the sky fifty miles away to the north. It was all very beautiful; yet it was not England.

CHAPTER XLVI

THE RUSSELLS

NEXT day Mrs. Russell walked over alone, and Helen fell in love with her then and there. She was one of those old ladies who make one feel that age can be really beautiful. Her complexion was almost as perfect as ever, and her eyes as clear as a child's. They were like her son's, large and dark and steady; but they had a singularly gentle and winning expression. Her thick silver hair was brushed into curls on each side of a smooth broad forehead. Something in her way of speaking and in her upright carriage reminded Helen of Miss Treveryan. It was a very sweet face and manner, and it was the face and manner of a gentlewoman born and bred. Helen felt at once that she could trust Mrs. Russell ; and when they had been ten minutes together they were on the best of terms. The liking was evidently

mutual.

Before long Mrs. Russell said something about the difference between Devonshire and Cornwall.

'Do you know Cornwall well?' Helen asked.

'No, I don't, but my mother's people were Cornish; and after my husband left the navy we went down to see the county, and he took a fancy to it. Then we happened to see a house to let that just suited us, and so we made up our minds to stay.'

'Do you live there now?'

'Yes, in the summer. We find it rather wet and rough in winter, so we have come here. We are to be turned out of our house after this year, and I don't know where we shall go then.' 'I come from Cornwall too,' Helen said; 'I wonder whether I know your part of it.'

'Our house is not far from Falmouth, on the water.'

'I know Falmouth. We did not live very near it, but I have been there to see people when I was a girl. We lived in a place you would not have heard of, I am afraid,—St. Erroc. It's some way down the coast.'

'Oh yes, I have heard of St. Erroc,' Mrs. Russell said. 'One of my aunts married a Treveryan of St. Erroc.'

It was curious. They found out that the Treveryan in question was a grand-uncle of Helen's, her grandfather's only brother who had been drowned many years before while serving in the navy. They agreed that they were very glad indeed, and it helped to draw them together. 'I hope you will let us see something of you now that we have found each other out,' the old lady said as she was going away. 'I am afraid,' she added, with

a slight hesitation in her manner, it must be a lonely life for you, my dear. Try not to think of me as quite a stranger,' and she looked at Helen for a moment with a tender pity in her eyes, and bent forward and kissed her.

Helen sat thinking over it after she had gone. What a beautiful old face it was; one that could look very firm, she felt sure, but so gentle and good and true. You could trust those eyes without the slightest reserve. How strange it was that they should have met, and how pleasant. Helen knew that she had found another friend that day, not a mere acquaintance.

And Mrs. Russell went away with her heart full of warmth and pity. 'What a sweet-looking girl,' she thought, 'and very young to be left alone in the world. I knew she was a lady directly I saw her. One can always tell. I am glad we are con

nected.'

For some weeks after that Helen saw the Russells very often. Admiral Russell was there when she first called, and he received her, and made himself perfectly delightful. He was a strong sailor-like old man, not nearly so tall as his son, but powerfully made, and in no way broken. It was a thoroughly green old age. 'Come in,' he said, walking out of the door to meet her, and shaking hands with outspoken admiration in his face. 'I have been longing to see you ever since my wife made your acquaintance. She could talk of nothing but her new cousin when she came back.'

'I am afraid I can hardly claim to be a cousin,' Helen said. 'I wish I could.'

'Oh, we're not going to let you cry off. You will have to

accept us; Cornish cousins, you know, Cornish cousins.' And cousins they were thenceforward. No one could have been kinder and more cordial than the two old people were. They got Helen to come over to dinner with them when they were alone, and treated her as one of themselves; and they made her go out driving with them; and they strolled in to Burnbraes and 'looked her up,' as the Admiral used to say, at all sorts of odd times. At the end of a month, when they began to get ready for their move to Cornwall, Helen felt as if she had known them for years.

She liked Colonel Russell too. He was more reserved in his manner than his father and mother, but he was always courteous and kind. There was just the mixture of strength and gentleness about him which is attractive to a womanly woman. In repose

his face was grave, almost stern, and the effect of it was increased by the great size of his frame. One could not help being struck and impressed by the massive head, and the broad chest and shoulders, and the unusual length of limb. The whole man was cast in a heroic mould. He looked as if a coat of mail would have suited him better than nineteenth-century broadcloth. You could imagine him, Helen thought, at Agincourt or Crecy, hewing out a way for the English flag; or on some battlefield of the Holy Land, smiting and slaying and scattering the enemies of the Cross. And yet children never seemed afraid of him, though men often were.

Helen and he got on very well. Russell was a man who, with all his deep admiration and respect for women, perhaps because of those feelings, was generally silent in women's society. He was wanting in the current coin of conversation, and felt himself at a disadvantage; but with Helen he was at his ease. She did not want him to flirt or flatter; and she had read and thought and suffered. He liked her unaffected ways and straightforward speech, and he saw that she really sympathised in his vehement love for his profession and his country; then her musical tastes were a keen pleasure to him. Though he neither played nor sang himself, he had inherited from his mother a deep feeling for music, and he thoroughly appreciated Helen's playing. After a time his mother succeeded in making her sing again. At first she shrank from it, but she did not like to refuse, and when she had once begun it soon became a real delight. She found that her voice had suffered little from her long neglect of it, and Russell was never tired of listening to her.

Shortly before the Russells left for Cornwall they asked Helen

to come and spend a week or two with them when they had settled down, and she readily agreed. They had made her feel so thoroughly at home that the visit seemed to promise unmixed pleasure; and she also thought that she might find an opportunity of seeing Laneithin. It would be a sad return; but she longed to be in St. Erroc again after all these years.