n to two young persons
"brought together."

CHAPTER XVII.

NOW, on that very day, and about the same hour in which the conversation
just recorded between Elsie and Mrs. Cameron took place, Kenelm, in his
solitary noonday wanderings, entered the burial-ground in which Lily had
some short time before surprised him. And there he found her, standing
beside the flower border which she had placed round the grave of the
child whom she had tended and nursed in vain.

The day was cloudless and sunless; one of those days that so often
instil a sentiment of melancholy into the heart of an English summer.

"You come here too often, Miss Mordaunt," said Kenelm, very softly, as
he approached.

Lily turned her face to him, without any start of surprise, with no
brightening change in its pensive expression,--an expression rare to the
mobile play of her features.

"Not too often. I promised to come as often as I could; and, as I told
you before, I have never broken a promise yet."

Kenelm made no answer. Presently the girl turned from the spot, and
Kenelm followed her silently till she halted before the old tombstone
with its effaced inscription.

"See," she said, with a faint smile, "I have put fresh flowers there.
Since the day we met in this churchyard, I have thought so much of that
tomb, so neglected, so forgotten, and--" she paused a moment, and went
on abruptly, "do you not often find that you are much too--what is
the word? ah! too egotistical, considering and pondering and dreaming
greatly too much about yourself?"

"Yes, you are right there; though, till you so accused me, my conscience
did not detect it."

"And don't you find that you escape from being so haunted by the thought
of yourself, when you think of the dead? they can never have any
share in your existence _here_. When you say, 'I shall do this or that
to-day;' when you dream, 'I may be this or that to-morrow,' you are
thinking and dreaming, all by yourself, for yourself. But you are out of
yourself, beyond yourself, when you think and dream of the dead, who can
have nothing to do with your to-day or your to-morrow."

As we all know, Kenelm Chillingly made it one of the rules of his life
never to be taken by surprise. But when the speech I have written down
came from the lips of that tamer of butterflies, he was so startled that
all it occurred to him to say, after a long pause, was,--

"The dead are the past; and with the past rests all in the pre