at.
I shall go back to Luscombe to arrange my affairs, come to terms with
Mr. Leland the corn-merchant, against my return, and--"

"The young lady is to wait till then."

"Emily--"

"Oh, that is the name? Emily! a much more elegant name than Jessie."

"Emily," continued Tom, with an unruffled placidity,--which, considering
the aggravating bitterness for which Kenelm had exchanged his wonted
dulcitudes of indifferentism, was absolutely saintlike, "Emily knows
that if she were my wife I should be proud of her, and will esteem me
the more if she feels how resolved I am that she shall never be ashamed
of me."

"Pardon me, Tom," said Kenelm softened, and laying his hand on his
friend's shoulder with brotherlike tenderness. "Nature has made you a
thorough gentleman; and you could not think and speak more nobly if you
had come into the world as the head of all the Howards."

CHAPTER IV.

TOM went away the next morning. He declined to see Jessie again, saying
curtly, "I don't wish the impression made on me the other evening to
incur a chance of being weakened."

Kenelm was in no mood to regret his friend's departure. Despite all
the improvement in Tom's manners and culture, which raised him so
much nearer to equality with the polite and instructed heir of the
Chillinglys, Kenelm would have felt more in sympathy and rapport with
the old disconsolate fellow-wanderer who had reclined with him on the
grass, listening to the minstrel's talk or verse, than he did with
the practical, rising citizen of Luscombe. To the young lover of Lily
Mordaunt there was a discord, a jar, in the knowledge that the human
heart admits of such well-reasoned, well-justified transfers of
allegiance; a Jessie to-day, or an Emily to-morrow; "La reine est morte:
vive la reine"

An hour or two after Tom had gone, Kenelm found himself almost
mechanically led towards Braefieldville. He had instinctively divined
Elsie's secret wish with regard to himself and Lily, however skilfully
she thought she had concealed it.

At Braefieldville he should hear talk of Lily, and in the scenes where
Lily had been first beheld.

He found Mrs. Braefield alone in the drawing-room, seated by a table
covered with flowers, which she was assorting and intermixing for the
vases to which they were destined.

It struck him that her manner was more reserved than usual and somewhat
embarrassed; and when, after a few preliminary matters of small talk,
he rushed bold