I now want is a good walk. Let me be your companion this
morning!'

'I was thinking of paying nurse a visit. What say you?'

'Oh! I am ready; anywhere.'

She ran for her bonnet, and he kissed her handkerchief, which she left
behind, and, I believe, everything else in the room which bore the
slightest relation to her. And then the recollection of Arundel's letter
came over him, and his joy fled. When she returned, he was standing
before the fire, gloomy and dull.

'I fear you are tired,' she said.

'Not in the least.'

'I shall never forgive myself if all this exertion make you ill.'

'Why not?'

'Because, although I will not tell papa, I am sure my nonsense is the
cause of your having gone to London.'

'It is probable; for you are the cause of all that does not disgrace
me.' He advanced, and was about to seize her hand; but the accursed
miniature occurred to him, and he repressed his feelings, almost with
a groan. She, too, had turned away her head, and was busily engaged in
tending a flower.

'Because she has explicitly declared her feelings to me, and, sincere
in that declaration, honours me by a friendship of which alone I am
unworthy, am I to persecute her with my dishonoured overtures--the twice
rejected? No, no!'

They took their way through the park, and he soon succeeded in
re-assuming the tone that befitted their situation. Traits of the
debate, and the debaters, which newspapers cannot convey, and which
he had not yet recounted; anecdotes of Annesley and their friends, and
other gossip, were offered for her amusement. But if she were amused,
she was not lively, but singularly, unusually silent. There was only one
point on which she seemed interested, and that was his speech. When he
was cheered, and who particularly cheered; who gathered round him,
and what they said after the debate: on all these points she was most
inquisitive.

They rambled on: nurse was quite forgotten; and at length they found
themselves in the beautiful valley, rendered more lovely by the ruins of
the abbey. It was a place that the Duke could never forget, and which he
ever avoided. He had never renewed his visit since he first gave vent,
among its reverend ruins, to his overcharged and most tumultuous heart.

They stood in silence before the holy pile with its vaulting arches and
crumbling walls, mellowed by the mild lustre of the declining sun. Not
two years had fled since here he first staggered after the breaking
g