lking silently they gained the little summer-house which
tradition dedicated to the memory of Izaak Walton. Lily entered it and
seated herself; Kenelm took his place beside her. It was a small octagon
building which, judging by its architecture, might have been built
in the troubled reign of Charles I.; the walls plastered within were
thickly covered with names and dates, and inscriptions in praise of
angling, in tribute to Izaak, or with quotations from his books. On
the opposite side they could see the lawn of Grasmere, with its great
willows dipping into the water. The stillness of the place, with its
associations of the angler's still life, were in harmony with the quiet
day, its breezeless air, and cloud-vested sky.

"You were to tell me your doubts in connection with your guardian,
doubts if he were right in something which you left unexplained, which
you could not yourself explain to him."

Lily started as from thoughts alien to the subject thus reintroduced.
"Yes, I cannot mention my doubts to him because they relate to me, and
he is so good. I owe him so much that I could not bear to vex him by a
word that might seem like reproach or complaint. You remember," here she
drew nearer to him; and with that ingenuous confiding look and movement
which had, not unfrequently, enraptured him at the moment, and saddened
him on reflection,--too ingenuous, too confiding, for the sentiment
with which he yearned to inspire her,--she turned towards him her frank
untimorous eyes, and laid her hand on his arm: "you remember that I said
in the burial-ground how much I felt that one is constantly thinking
too much of one's self. That must be wrong. In talking to you only about
myself I know I am wrong, but I cannot help it: I must do so. Do not
think ill of me for it. You see I have not been brought up like other
girls. Was my guardian right in that? Perhaps if he had insisted upon
not letting me have my own wilful way, if he had made me read the books
which Mr. and Mrs. Emlyn wanted to force on me, instead of the poems and
fairy tales which he gave me, I should have had so much more to think of
that I should have thought less of myself. You said that the dead were
the past; one forgets one's self when one thinks of the dead. If I had
read more of the past, had more subjects of interest in the dead whose
history it tells, surely I should be less shut up, as it were, in my
own small, selfish heart? It is only very lately I have tho