a few
whiffs, and, when he saw that Tom had resumed his own cigar, recommenced
conversation.

"You don't know as to the good; but tell me honestly, do you think if
you had not loved Jessie Wiles, you would be as good a man as you are
now?"

"If I am better than I was, it is not because of my love for the girl."

"What then?"

"The loss of her."

Kenelm started, turned very pale, threw aside the cigar, rose, and
walked the room to and fro with very quick but very irregular strides.

Tom continued quietly. "Suppose I had won Jessie and married her, I
don't think any idea of improving myself would have entered my head. My
uncle would have been very much offended at my marrying a day-labourer's
daughter, and would not have invited me to Luscombe. I should have
remained at Graveleigh, with no ambition of being more than a common
farrier, an ignorant, noisy, quarrelsome man; and if I could not have
made Jessie as fond of me as I wished, I should not have broken myself
of drinking, and I shudder to think what a brute I might have been, when
I see in the newspapers an account of some drunken wife-beater. How do
we know but what that wife-beater loved his wife dearly before marriage,
and she did not care for him? His home was unhappy, and so he took to
drink and to wife-beating."

"I was right, then," said Kenelm, halting his strides, "when I told you
it would be a miserable fate to be married to a girl whom you loved to
distraction, and whose heart you could never warm to you, whose life you
could never render happy."

"So right!"

"Let us drop that part of the subject at present," said Kenelm,
reseating himself, "and talk about your wish to travel. Though contented
that you did not marry Jessie, though you can now, without anguish,
greet her as the wife of another, still there are some lingering
thoughts of her that make you restless; and you feel that you could more
easily wrench yourself from these thoughts in a marked change of scene
and adventure, that you might bury them altogether in the soil of a
strange land. Is it so?"

"Ay, something of that, sir."

Then Kenelm roused himself to talk of foreign lands, and to map out a
plan of travel that might occupy some months. He was pleased to find
that Tom had already learned enough of French to make himself understood
at least upon commonplace matters, and still more pleased to discover
that he had been not only reading the proper guide-books or manuals
descript