he was. 'Yes!' she would reply encouragingly
to Seymour Austin's fond brooding hum about his hero; and 'Yes!'
conclusively: like an incarnation of stupidity dealing in monosyllables.
She was unworthy of the society of a scholar. Nor could she kneel at
the feet of her especial heroes: Dante, Raphael, Buonarotti: she was
unworthy of them. She longed to be at Mount Laurels. Mr. Tuckham's
conversation was the nearest approach to it--as it were round by
Greenland; but it was homeward.

She was really grieved to lose him. Business called him to England.

'What business can it be, papa?' she inquired: and the colonel replied
briefly: 'Ours.'

Mr. Austin now devoted much of his time to the instruction of her in
the ancient life of the Eternal City. He had certain volumes of Livy,
Niebuhr, and Gibbon, from which he read her extracts at night, shunning
the scepticism and the irony of the moderns, so that there should be no
jar on the awakening interest of his fair pupil and patient. A gentle
cross-hauling ensued between them, that they grew conscious of and
laughed over during their peregrinations in and out of Rome: she pulled
for the Republic of the Scipios; his predilections were toward the Rome
of the wise and clement emperors. To Cecilia's mind Rome rocked at a
period so closely neighbouring her decay: to him, with an imagination
brooding on the fuller knowledge of it, the city breathed securely, the
sky was clear; jurisprudence, rhetoric, statesmanship, then flourished
supreme, and men eminent for culture: the finest flowers of our race, he
thought them: and he thought their Age the manhood of Rome.

Struck suddenly by a feminine subtle comparison that she could not
have framed in speech, Cecilia bowed to his views of the happiness and
elevation proper to the sway of a sagacious and magnanimous Imperialism
of the Roman pattern:--he rejected the French. She mused on dim
old thoughts of the gracious dignity of a woman's life under high
governorship. Turbulent young men imperilled it at every step. The
trained, the grave, the partly grey, were fitting lords and mates for
women aspiring to moral beauty and distinction. Beside such they should
be planted, if they would climb! Her walks and conversations with
Seymour Austin charmed her as the haze of a summer evening charms the
sight.

Upon the conclusion of her term of exile Cecilia would gladly have
remained in Italy another month. An appointment of her father's with
Mr.