ially when Mr. Emlyn began to speak about Mrs.
Cameron and Lily. Of the first he said, "She is one of those women in
whom quiet is so predominant that it is long before one can know what
undercurrents of good feeling flow beneath the unruffled surface.
I wish, however, she was a little more active in the management and
education of her niece,--a girl in whom I feel a very anxious interest,
and whom I doubt if Mrs. Cameron understands. Perhaps, however, only
a poet, and a very peculiar sort of poet, can understand her: Lily
Mordaunt is herself a poem."

"I like your definition of her," said Kenelm. "There is certainly
something about her which differs much from the prose of common life."

"You probably know Wordsworth's lines:

"'... and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty, born of murmuring sound,
Shall pass into her face.'

"They are lines that many critics have found unintelligible; but Lily
seems like the living key to them."

Kenelm's dark face lighted up, but he made no answer.

"Only," continued Mr. Emlyn, "how a girl of that sort, left wholly to
herself, untrained, undisciplined, is to grow up into the practical uses
of womanhood, is a question that perplexes and saddens me."

"Any more wine?" asked the host, closing a conversation on commercial
matters with Sir Thomas. "No?--shall we join the ladies?"

CHAPTER VII.

THE drawing-room was deserted; the ladies were in the garden. As Kenelm
and Mr. Emlyn walked side by side towards the group (Sir Thomas and Mr.
Braefield following at a little distance), the former asked, somewhat
abruptly, "What sort of man is Miss Cameron's guardian, Mr. Melville?"

"I can scarcely answer that question. I see little of him when he comes
here. Formerly, he used to run down pretty often with a harum-scarum
set of young fellows, quartered at Cromwell Lodge,--Grasmere had no
accommodation for them,--students in the Academy, I suppose. For some
years he has not brought those persons, and when he does come himself it
is but for a few days. He has the reputation of being very wild."

Further conversation was here stopped. The two men, while they thus
talked, had been diverging from the straight way across the lawn towards
the ladies, turning into sequestered paths through the shrubbery; now
they emerged into the open sward, just before a table, on which coffee
was served, and round which all