LILIAN’S PERPLEXITIES.
A TALE IN TWELVE CHAPTERS.
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CHAPTER X. OLD AND NEW.
It was a mighty help and staff of comfort to Lilian amid the sorrow for her brother’s death, that declaration of faith in her character which Frank Scott had made. She was deeply, deeply grateful to him. On the word of another she was not as weak and mean and trivial as she had imagined, and she clung desperately to that assurance, for it seemed to give her the power of worthily mourning her brother’s noble death. She had indeed fallen low, but it was within the capacity of her soul to be noble and true. She was not forced to stand afar off and mourn for one whose nature was alien to hers, feeling that her miserable insignificance had naught in common with his nobleness. They were brother and sister, the same flesh and blood, yes, of like natures, though he had acted nobly, and she ignobly, in the fight of life.
But by God’s help she could rise to him. She might dwell on all his nobleness with the exulting thought that she could make that nobleness her own.
Mind, I am giving a sister’s estimate of Frederick Temple’s character—he had acted nobly, as thousands act, but affection specialises where the world only generalises.
Balsam of comfort, prepared according to divers prescriptions, was offered to Lilian by zealous friends, but those words of Frank Scott, spoken for the furtherance of his own ends, were her only consolation.
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Five months had elapsed since the intelligence of death had arrived, but there came a second season of mourning when the personal property, personal belongings of Frederick Temple, arrived in England.
