In the drawing-room, poor Lancelot, after rejecting overtures of fraternity from several young ladies, set himself steadily again against the wall to sulk and watch Argemone. But this time she spied in a few minutes his melancholy, moonstruck face, swam up to him, and said something kind and commonplace. She spoke in the simplicity of her heart, but he chose to think she was patronising him—she had not talked commonplaces to the vicar. He tried to say something smart and cutting,-stuttered, broke down, blushed, and shrunk back again to the wall, fancying that every eye in the room was on him; and for one moment a flash of sheer hatred to Argemone swept through him.

Was Argemone patronising him? Of course she was. True, she was but three-and-twenty, and he was of the same age; but, spiritually and socially, the girl develops ten years earlier than the boy. She was flattered and worshipped by grey-headed men, and in her simplicity she thought it a noble selfsacrifice to stoop to notice the poor awkward youth. And yet if he could have seen the pure moonlight of sisterly pity which filled all her heart as she retreated, with something of a blush and something of a sigh, and her heart fluttered and fell, would he have been content? Not he. It was her love he wanted, and not her pity; it was to conquer her, and possess her, and inform himself with her image and her with his own; though as yet he did not know it; though the moment that she turned away he cursed himself for selfish vanity, and moroseness, and conceit.

Who am I to demand her all to myself? Her, the glorious, the saintly, the unfallen! Is not a look, a word, infinitely more than I deserve? And yet I pretend to admire tales of chivalry! Old knightly hearts would have fought and wandered for years to earn a tithe of the favours which have been bestowed on me unasked.'

Peace! poor Lancelot Thy egg is by no means addle; but the chick is breaking the shell in somewhat a cross-grained fashion.

120

CHAPTER VII.

THE DRIVE HOME, AND WHAT CAME OF IT.

NOW it was not extraordinary that Squire Laving

ton had 'assimilated' a couple of bottles of Carbonel's best port; for however abstemious the new lord himself might be, he felt for the habits, and for the vote of an old-fashioned Whig squire. Nor was it extraordinary that he fell fast asleep the moment he got into the carriage; nor, again, that his wife and daughters were not solicitous about waking him; nor, on the other hand, that the coachman and footman, who were like all the squire's servants, of the good old sort, honest, faithful, boozing, extravagant, happy-go-lucky souls, who had been about the place these forty years,' were somewhat owlish and unsteady on the box. Nor was it extraordinary that there was a heavy storm of lightning, for that happened three times a-week in the chalk-hills the summer through; nor, again, that under these circumstances the horses, who were of the squire's own breeding, and never thoroughly broke (nothing was done thoroughly at Whitford) went rather wildly home, and that the carriage swung alarmingly down the steep hills, and the boughs brushed the windows.

rather too often. But it was extraordinary that Mrs. Lavington had cast off her usual primness, and seemed to-night, for the first time in her life, in an exuberant good humour, which she evinced by snubbing her usual favourite Honoria, and lavishing caresses on Argemone, whose vagaries she usually regarded with a sort of puzzled terror, like a hen who has hatched a duckling.

'Honoria, take your feet off my dress. Argemone, my child, I hope you spent a pleasant evening?' Argemone answered by some tossy commonplace. A pause and then Mrs. Lavington re-com

menced,

'How very pleasing that poor young Lord Vieuxbois is, after all!'

'I thought you disliked him so much.'

His opinions, my child; but we must hope for the best. He seems moral, and well inclined, and really desirous of doing good in his way; and so successful in the House, too, I hear.'

'To me,' said Argemone, he seems to want life, originality, depth, everything that makes a great man. He knows nothing but what he has picked up ready-made from books. After all, his opinions are the one redeeming point in him.'

Ah, my dear, when it pleases Heaven to open your eyes, you will see as I do!'

Poor Mrs. Lavington! Unconscious spokeswoman for the ninety-nine hundredths of the human race! What are we all doing from morning to night, but set

G

ting up our own fancies as the measure of all heaven and earth, and saying, each in his own dialect, Whig, Radical, or Tory, Papist or Protestant, When it pleases Heaven to open your eyes, you will see as I do?

It is a great pity,' went on Mrs. Lavington, meditatively, 'to see a young man so benighted and thrown away. With his vast fortune, too,-such a means of good! Really we ought to have seen a little more of him. I think Mr. O'Blareaway's conversation might be a blessing to him. I think of asking him over to stay a week at Whitford, to meet that sainted young man.'

Now Argemone did not think the Reverend Panurgus O'Blareaway, incumbent of Lower Whitford, at all a sainted young man, but on the contrary, a very vulgar, slippery Irishman; and she had, somehow, tired of her late favourite, Lord Vieuxbois; so she answered tossily enough,

'Really, mamma, a week of Lord Vieuxbois will be too much. We shall be bored to death with the Cambridge Camden Society, and ballads for the people.'

'I think, my dear,' said Mrs. Lavington (who had, half-unconsciously to herself, more reasons than one for bringing the young lord to Whitford), ‘I think, my dear, that his conversation, with all its faults, will be a very improving change for your father. I hope he's asleep.'

The squire's nose answered for itself.

6

Really, what between Mr. Smith and Colonel