."

"Yes, I could fancy him a dangerous wooer. He has wit and liveliness and
audacity; he could be very much in love with a great fortune, and talk
to the owner of it with a fervour rarely exhibited by a Chillingly.
Well, it is no affair of mine."

"It ought to be."

Alas and alas! that "ought to be;" what depths of sorrowful meaning lie
within that simple phrase! How happy would be our lives, how grand our
actions, how pure our souls, if all could be with us as it ought to be!

CHAPTER VIII.

WE often form cordial intimacies in the confined society of a country
house, or a quiet watering-place, or a small Continental town, which
fade away into remote acquaintanceship in the mighty vortex of London
life, neither party being to blame for the estrangement. It was so with
Leopold Travers and Kenelm Chillingly. Travers, as we have seen, had
felt a powerful charm in the converse of the young stranger, so in
contrast with the routine of the rural companionships to which his alert
intellect had for many years circumscribed its range. But on reappearing
in London the season before Kenelm again met him, he had renewed old
friendships with men of his own standing,--officers in the regiment of
which he had once been a popular ornament, some of them still unmarried,
a few of them like himself widowed, others who had been his rivals
in fashion, and were still pleasant idlers about town; and it rarely
happens in a metropolis that we have intimate friendships with those of
another generation, unless there be some common tie in the cultivation
of art and letters, or the action of kindred sympathies in the party
strife of politics. Therefore Travers and Kenelm had had little familiar
communication with each other since they first met at the Beaumanoirs'.
Now and then they found themselves at the same crowded assemblies, and
interchanged nods and salutations. But their habits were different; the
houses at which they were intimate were not the same, neither did they
frequent the same clubs. Kenelm's chief bodily exercise was still that
of long and early rambles into rural suburbs; Leopold's was that of
a late ride in the Row. Of the two, Leopold was much more the man of
pleasure. Once restored to metropolitan life, a temper constitutionally
eager, ardent, and convivial took kindly, as in earlier youth, to its
light range of enjoyments.

Had the intercourse between the two men been as frankly familiar as it
had been at Neesdale