Park, Kenelm would probably have seen much more of
Cecilia at her own home; and the admiration and esteem with which she
already inspired him might have ripened into much warmer feeling, had
he thus been brought into clearer comprehension of the soft and womanly
heart, and its tender predisposition towards himself.

He had said somewhat vaguely in his letter to Sir Peter, that "sometimes
he felt as if his indifference to love, as to ambition, was because he
had some impossible ideal in each." Taking that conjecture to task,
he could not honestly persuade himself that he had formed any ideal of
woman and wife with which the reality of Cecilia Travers was at war. On
the contrary, the more he thought over the characteristics of Cecilia,
the more they seemed to correspond to any ideal that had floated before
him in the twilight of dreamy revery; and yet he knew that he was not
in love with her, that his heart did not respond to his reason; and
mournfully he resigned himself to the conviction that nowhere in
this planet, from the normal pursuits of whose inhabitants he felt so
estranged, was there waiting for him the smiling playmate, the earnest
helpmate. As this conviction strengthened, so an increased weariness
of the artificial life of the metropolis, and of all its objects and
amusements, turned his thoughts with an intense yearning towards the
Bohemian freedom and fresh excitements of his foot ramblings. He often
thought with envy of the wandering minstrel, and wondered whether, if he
again traversed the same range of country, he might encounter again that
vagrant singer.

CHAPTER IX.

IT is nearly a week since Kenelm had met Cecilia, and he is sitting
in his rooms with Lord Thetford at that hour of three in the afternoon
which is found the most difficult to dispose of by idlers about town.
Amongst young men of his own age and class with whom Kenelm assorted in
the fashionable world, perhaps the one whom he liked the best, and of
whom he saw the most, was this young heir of the Beaumanoirs; and though
Lord Thetford has nothing to do with the direct stream of my story, it
is worth pausing a few minutes to sketch an outline of one of the
best whom the last generation has produced for a part that, owing to
accidents of birth and fortune, young men like Lord Thetford must play
on that stage from which the curtain is not yet drawn up. Destined to
be the head of a family that unites with princely possessions and a
his