r."

"Ah, you think that!" exclaimed Kenelm, eagerly, and turning eyes that
sparkled with joy towards the lawn of Grasmere. "You think that; it is
very sensibly said,--well, and you have been pressed to marry, and have
hung back till you had seen again Mrs. Somers. Now you will be better
disposed to such a step; tell me about it?"

"I said, last evening, that one of the principal capitalists at
Luscombe, the leading corn-merchant, had offered to take me into
partnership. And, sir, he has an only daughter, she is a very amiable
girl, has had a first-rate education, and has such pleasant manners and
way of talk, quite a lady. If I married her I should soon be the first
man in Luscombe, and Luscombe, as you are no doubt aware, returns two
members to Parliament; who knows, but that some day the farrier's son
might be--" Tom stopped abruptly, abashed at the aspiring thought which,
while speaking, had deepened his hardy colour and flashed from his
honest eyes.

"Ah!" said Kenelm, almost mournfully, "is it so? must each man in his
life play many parts? Ambition succeeds to love, the reasoning brain to
the passionate heart. True, you are changed; my Tom Bowles is gone."

"Not gone in his undying gratitude to you, sir," said Tom, with great
emotion. "Your Tom Bowles would give up all his dreams of wealth or of
rising in life, and go through fire and water to serve the friend who
first bid him be a new Tom Bowles! Don't despise me as your own work:
you said to me that terrible day, when madness was on my brow and crime
within my heart, 'I will be to you the truest friend man ever found in
man.' So you have been. You commanded me to read; you commanded me to
think; you taught me that body should be the servant of mind."

"Hush, hush, times are altered; it is you who can teach me now. Teach
me, teach me; how does ambition replace love? How does the desire to
rise in life become the all-mastering passion, and, should it prosper,
the all-atoning consolation of our life? We can never be as happy,
though we rose to the throne of the Caesars, as we dream that we
could have been, had Heaven but permitted us to dwell in the obscurest
village, side by side with the woman we love."

Tom was exceedingly startled by such a burst of irrepressible passion
from the man who had told him that, though friends were found only once
in a life, sweethearts were as plentiful as blackberries.

Again he swept his hand over his forehead, and replied