e. With you obtained, I
have grown a dullard, and left off dreaming. But let me see, a house
in England--you like England--some ten or twenty miles from the great
Babel: books, pictures, statues, and old trees that shall put us in mind
of our Norman fathers who planted them; above all, a noisy, clear sunny
stream gliding amidst them--deer on the opposite bank, half hidden
amongst the fern; and rooks overhead: a privilege for eccentricity that
would allow one to be social or solitary as one pleased; and a house so
full of guests, that to shun them all now and then would be no affront
to one."

"Well," said Constance, smiling, "go on."

"I have finished."

"Finished?"

"Yes, my fair Insatiable! What more would you have?"

"Why, this is but a country-life you have been talking of; very well in
its way for three months in the year."

"Italy, then, for the other nine," returned Godolphin.

"Ah, Percy!--is pleasure, mere pleasure, vulgar pleasure,--to be really
the sole end and aim of life?"

"Assuredly."

"And action, enterprise-are these as nothing?"

Godolphin was silent, but began absently to throw pebbles into the
water. The action reminded Constance of the first time she had ever seen
him among his ancestral groves; and she sighed as she now gazed on a
brow from which the effeminacy and dreaming of his life had banished
much of its early chivalric and earnest expression.

CHAPTER XLVII.

NEWS OF LUCILLA.

Godolphin was about one morning to depart for the convent to which
Lucilla had flown, when a letter was brought to him from the abbess of
the convent herself; it had followed him from Rome. Lucilla had left her
retreat--left it three days before Godolphin's marriage; the abbess knew
not whither, but believed she intended to reside in Rome. She inclosed
him a note from Lucilla, left for him before her departure. Short but
characteristic, it ran thus:

LUCILLA TO GODOLPHIN.

"I can stay here no longer; my mind will not submit to quiet; this
inactivity wears me to madness. Besides, I want to see thy wife. I shall
go to Rome; I shall witness thy wedding; and then--ah! what then? Give
me back. Godolphin, oh; give me back the young pure heart I had ere I
loved you! Then, I could take joy in all things:--now! But I will not
repine; it is beneath me. I, the daughter of the stars, am no love-sick
and nerveless minion of a vain regret; my pride is roused at last, and I
feel at least the independen