And of such bedchambers there were too many in Whitford Priors.

The first evening that Lancelot came downstairs, Honoria clapped her
hands outright for joy as he entered, and ran up and down for ten
minutes, fetching and carrying endless unnecessary cushions and
footstools; while Argemone greeted him with a cold distant bow, and
a fine-lady drawl of carefully commonplace congratulations. Her
heart smote her though, as she saw the wan face and the wild,
melancholy, moonstruck eyes once more glaring through and through
her; she found a comfort in thinking his stare impertinent, drew
herself up, and turned away; once, indeed, she could not help
listening, as Lancelot thanked Mrs. Lavington for all the pious and
edifying books with which the good lady had kept his room rather
than his brain furnished for the last six weeks; he was going to say
more, but he saw the colonel's quaint foxy eye peering at him,
remembered St. Francis de Sales, and held his tongue.

But, as her destiny was, Argemone found herself, in the course of
the evening, alone with Lancelot, at the open window. It was a
still, hot, heavy night, after long easterly drought; sheet-
lightning glimmered on the far horizon over the dark woodlands; the
coming shower had sent forward as his herald a whispering draught of
fragrant air.

'What a delicious shiver is creeping over those limes!' said
Lancelot, half to himself.

The expression struck Argemone: it was the right one, and it seemed
to open vistas of feeling and observation in the speaker which she
had not suspected. There was a rich melancholy in the voice;--she
turned to look at him.

'Ay,' he went on; 'and the same heat which crisps those thirsty
leaves must breed the thunder-shower which cools them? But so it is
throughout the universe: every yearning proves the existence of an
object meant to satisfy it; the same law creates both the giver and
the receiver, the longing and its home.'

'If one could but know sometimes what it is for which one is
longing!' said Argemone, without knowing that she was speaking from
her inmost heart: but thus does the soul involuntarily lay bare its
most unspoken depths in the presence of its yet unknown mate, and
then shudders at its own ABANDON as it first tries on the wedding
garment of Paradise.

Lancelot was not yet past the era at which young geniuses are apt to
'talk book' at little.

'For what?' he answered, flashi