yet."

"And that vocation, sir, is--"

"Metaphysics," said my father. "He will be quite at home in puzzling
over Berkeley, and considering whether the Speaker's chair and the
official red boxes were really things whose ideas of figure, extension,
and hardness were all in the mind. It will be a great consolation to
him to agree with Berkeley, and to find that he has only been baffled by
immaterial phantasma!"

My father was quite right. The repining, subtle, truth-weighing
Trevanion, plagued by his conscience into seeing all sides of a question
(for the least question has more than two sides, and is hexagonal at
least), was much more fitted to discover the origin of ideas than to
convince Cabinets and Nations that two and two make four,--a proposition
on which he himself would have agreed with Abraham Tucker where that
most ingenious and suggestive of all English metaphysicians observes,
"Well, persuaded as I am that two and two make four, if I were to meet
with a person of credit, candor, and understanding who should sincerely
call it in question, I would give him a hearing; for I am not more
certain of that than of the whole being greater than a part. And yet I
could myself suggest some considerations that might seem to controvert
this point." (3) I can so well imagine Trevanion listening to "some
person of credit, candor, and understanding" in disproof of that vulgar
proposition that twice two make four! But the news of this arrival,
including that of Lady Castleton, disturbed me greatly, and I took to
long wanderings alone. In one of these rambles they all called at the
Tower,--Lord and Lady Ulverstone, the Castletons, and their children.
I escaped the visit; and on my return home there was a certain delicacy
respecting old associations that restrained much talk, before me, on so
momentous an event. Roland, like me, had kept out of the way. Blanche,
poor child, ignorant of the antecedents, was the most communicative.
And the especial theme she selected was the grace and beauty of Lady
Castleton!

A pressing invitation to spend some days at the castle had been
cordially given to all. It was accepted only by myself: I wrote word
that I would come.

Yes, I longed to prove the strength of my own self-conquest, and
accurately test the nature of the feelings that had disturbed me. That
any sentiment which could be called "love" remained for Lady Castleton,
the wife of another, and that other a man with so many clai