Having thus, as he thought, safely provided for his two young charges, Helen and Leonard, the Doctor then gave himself up to his final preparations for departure. He left a short note for Leonard with Mr. Prickett, containing some brief advice, some kind cheering; a postscript to the effect that he had not communicated to Mrs. Avenel the information Leonard had acquired, and that it were best to leave her in that ignorance; and six small powders to be dissolved in water, and a tea-spoonful every fourth hour--"Sovereign against rage and sombre thoughts," wrote the Doctor. By the evening of the next day Dr. Morgan, accompanied by his pet patient with the chronic tic, whom he had talked into exile, was on the steamboat on his way to Ostend.
Leonard resumed his life at Mr. Prickett's; but the change in him did not escape the bookseller. All his ingenious simplicity had deserted him. He was very distant, and very taciturn; he seemed to have grown much older. I shall not attempt to analyze metaphysically this change. By the help of such words as Leonard may himself occasionally let fall, the reader will dive into the boy's heart, and see how there the change had worked, and is working still. The happy dreamy peasant-genius, gazing on glory with inebriate, undazzled eyes, is no more. It is a man, suddenly cut off from the old household holy ties--conscious of great powers, and confronted on all sides by barriers of iron--alone with hard reality, and scornful London; and if he catches a glimpse of the lost Helicon, he sees, where he saw the muse, a pale melancholy spirit veiling its face in shame--the ghost of the mournful mother, whose child has no name, not even the humblest, among the family of men.
On the second evening after Dr. Morgan's departure, as Leonard was just about to leave the shop, a customer stepped in with a book in his hand which he had snatched from the shop-boy, who was removing the volumes for the night from the booth without.
"Mr. Prickett, Mr. Prickett!" said the customer, "I am ashamed of you. You presume to put upon this work, in two volumes, the sum of eight shillings."
Mr. Prickett stepped forth from the Cimmerian gloom of some recess, and cried, "What! Mr. Burley, is that you? But for your voice I should not have known you."