e face was changed,--so
changed! its old serenity of expression, at once grave and sweet,
succeeded by a wild trouble in the heavy eyelids and trembling lips.

"Mr. Chillingly,--you! Is it possible?"

"Varus, Varus," exclaimed Kenelm, passionately, "what hast thou done
with my legions?"

At that quotation of the well-known greeting of Augustus to his
unfortunate general, the scholar recoiled. Had his young friend's mind
deserted him,--dazed, perhaps, by over-study?

He was soon reassured; Kenelm's face settled back into calm, though a
dreary calm, like that of the wintry day.

"I beg pardon, Mr. Emlyn; I had not quite shaken off the hold of a
strange dream. I dreamed that I was worse off than Augustus: he did not
lose the world when the legions he had trusted to another vanished into
a grave."

Here Kenelm linked his arm in that of the rector,--on which he leaned
rather heavily,--and drew him on from the burial-ground into the open
space where the two paths met.

"But how long have you returned to Moleswich?" asked Emlyn; "and how
came you to choose so damp a bed for your morning slumbers?"

"The wintry cold crept into my veins when I stood in the burial-ground,
and I was very weary; I had no sleep at night. Do not let me take you
out of your way; I am going on to Grasmere. So I see, by the record on a
gravestone, that it is more than a year ago since Mr. Melville lost his
wife."

"Wife? He never married."

"What!" cried Kenelm. "Whose, then, is that gravestone,--'L. M.'?"

"Alas! it is our poor Lily's."

"And she died unmarried?"

As Kenelm said this he looked up, and the sun broke out from the
gloomy haze of the morning. "I may claim thee, then," he thought within
himself, "claim thee as mine when we meet again."

"Unmarried,--yes," resumed the vicar. "She was indeed betrothed to her
guardian; they were to have been married in the autumn, on his return
from the Rhine. He went there to paint on the spot itself his great
picture, which is now so famous,--'Roland, the Hermit Knight, looking
towards the convent lattice for a sight of the Holy Nun.' Melville had
scarcely gone before the symptoms of the disease which proved fatal to
poor Lily betrayed themselves; they baffled all medical skill,--rapid
decline. She was always very delicate, but no one detected in her the
seeds of consumption. Melville only returned a day or two before her
death. Dear childlike Lily! how we all mourned for her!--not least th