arties numerous--when birds sing
in the groves of Richmond, and whitebait refresh the statesman by the
shores of Greenwich,--Maltravers abruptly fled from the gay metropolis,
and arrived, one lovely evening in July, at his own ivy-grown porch of
Burleigh.

What a soft, fresh, delicious evening it was! He had quitted his
carriage at the lodge, and followed it across the small but picturesque
park alone and on foot. He had not seen the place since childhood--he
had quite forgotten its aspect. He now wondered how he could have lived
anywhere else. The trees did not stand in stately avenues, nor did the
antlers of the deer wave above the sombre fern; it was not the domain
of a grand seigneur, but of an old, long-descended English squire.
Antiquity spoke in the moss-grown palings in the shadowy groves, in
the sharp gable-ends and heavy mullions of the house, as it now came in
view, at the base of a hill covered with wood--and partially veiled by
the shrubs of the neglected pleasure-ground, separated from the park by
the invisible ha-ha. There, gleamed in the twilight the watery face
of the oblong fish-pool, with its old-fashioned willows at each
corner--there, grey and quaint, was the monastic dial--and there was the
long terrace walk, with discoloured and broken vases, now filled with
the orange or the aloe, which, in honour of his master's arrival,
the gardener had extracted from the dilapidated green-house. The
very evidence of neglect around, the very weeds and grass on the
half-obliterated road, touched Maltravers with a sort of pitying and
remorseful affection for his calm and sequestered residence. And it was
not with his usual proud step and erect crest that he passed from the
porch to the solitary library, through a line of his servants:--the two
or three old retainers belonging to the place were utterly unfamiliar to
him, and they had no smile for their stranger lord.

CHAPTER IV.

"_Lucian._ He that is born to be a man neither should nor can
be anything nobler, greater, and better than a man.

"_Peregrine._ But, good Lucian, for the very reason that he may
not become less than a man, he should be always striving to be
more."--WIELAND'S _Peregrinus Proteus_.

IT was two years from the date of the last chapter before Maltravers
again appeared in general society. These two years had sufficed to
produce a revolution in his fate. Ernest Maltravers had lost the happy
rights of the private individual; h