guest both felt they had had enough of each other. Kenelm soon rose
to depart.

Mr. Roach, on taking leave of, him at the door, said, with marked
emphasis,--

"Not for my personal satisfaction,--remember that. Whenever you hear my
conversion discussed in the world, say that from my own lips you heard
these words,--NOT FOR MY PERSONAL SATISFACTION. No! my kind regards to
Welby,--a married man himself, and a father: he will understand me."

CHAPTER IX.

ON quitting Oxford, Kenelm wandered for several days about the country,
advancing to no definite goal, meeting with no noticeable adventure.
At last he found himself mechanically retracing his steps. A magnetic
influence he could not resist drew him back towards the grassy meads and
the sparkling rill of Moleswich.

"There must be," said he to himself, "a mental, like an optical,
illusion. In the last, we fancy we have seen a spectre. If we dare not
face the apparition,--dare not attempt to touch it,--run superstitiously
away from it,--what happens? We shall believe to our dying day that it
was not an illusion, that it was a spectre; and so we may be crazed for
life. But if we manfully walk up to the phantom, stretch our hands
to seize it, oh! it fades into thin air, the cheat of our eyesight is
dispelled, and we shall never be ghost-ridden again. So it must be with
this mental illusion of mine. I see an image strange to my experience:
it seems to me, at first sight, clothed with a supernatural charm; like
an unreasoning coward, I run away from it. It continues to haunt me; I
cannot shut out its apparition. It pursues me by day alike in the haunts
of men,--alike in the solitudes of nature; it visits me by night in my
dreams. I begin to say this must be a real visitant from another world:
it must be love; the love of which I read in the Poets, as in the Poets
I read of witchcraft and ghosts. Surely I must approach that apparition
as a philosopher like Sir David Brewster would approach the black
cat seated on a hearth-rug, which he tells us that some lady of his
acquaintance constantly saw till she went into a world into which black
cats are not held to be admitted. The more I think of it the less
it appears to me possible that I can be really in love with a wild,
half-educated, anomalous creature, merely because the apparition of
her face haunts me. With perfect safety, therefore, I can approach the
creature; in proportion as I see more of her the illusion will va