sented itself to him as a duty; perhaps
so much the better, that it might be the more thoroughly a free-will
offering of love. At least it opened a new field of amusement and
knowledge; it promised him new studies of human life; and as he lay
on his sofa and let his thoughts flow, Tregarva's dark revelations
began to mix themselves with dreams about the regeneration of the
Whitford poor, and those again with dreams about the heiress of
Whitford; and many a luscious scene and noble plan rose brightly
detailed in his exuberant imagination. For Lancelot, like all born
artists, could only think in a concrete form. He never worked out a
subject without embodying it in some set oration, dialogue, or
dramatic castle in the air.

But the more he dreamt, the more he felt that a material beauty of
flesh and blood required a material house, baths, and boudoirs,
conservatories, and carriages; a safe material purse, and fixed
material society; law and order, and the established frame-work of
society, gained an importance in his eyes which they had never had
before.

'Well,' he said to himself, 'I am turning quite practical and auld-
warld. Those old Greeks were not so far wrong when they said that
what made men citizens, patriots, heroes, was the love of wedded
wife and child.'

'Wedded wife and child!'--He shrank in from the daring of the
delicious thought, as if he had intruded without invitation into a
hidden sanctuary, and looked round for a book to drive away the
dazzling picture. But even there his thoughts were haunted by
Argemone's face, and

'When his regard
Was raised by intense pensiveness, two eyes,
Two starry eyes, hung in the gloom of thought,
And seemed, with their serene and azure smiles,
To beckon him.'

He took up, with a new interest 'Chartism,' which alone of all Mr.
Carlyle's works he had hitherto disliked, because his own luxurious
day-dreams had always flowed in such sad discord with the terrible
warnings of the modern seer, and his dark vistas of starvation,
crime, neglect, and discontent.

'Well,' he said to himself, as he closed the book, 'I suppose it is
good for us easy-going ones now and then to face the possibility of
a change. Gold has grown on my back as feathers do on geese,
without my own will or deed; but considering that gold, like
feathers, is equally useful to those who have and those who have
not, why, it is worth while for the goose to rem