ce, on
that eve when you saw her whose face till then had haunted you, another
man's happy wife, and in so seeing her, either her face was changed or
your heart became so."

"Quite true. I might express it otherwise, but the fact remains the
same."

"God bless you, Tom; bless you in your career without, in your home
within," said Kenelm, wringing his friend's hand at the door of the
carriage that was to whirl to love and wealth and station the whilom
bully of a village, along the iron groove of that contrivance which,
though now the tritest of prosaic realities, seemed once too poetical
for a poet's wildest visions.

CHAPTER X.

A WINTER'S evening at Moleswich. Very different from a winter sunset
at Naples. It is intensely cold. There has been a slight fall of snow,
accompanied with severe, bright, clean frost, a thin sprinkling of white
on the pavements. Kenelm Chillingly entered the town on foot, no longer
a knapsack on his back. Passing through the main street, he paused a
moment at the door of Will Somers. The shop was closed. No, he would
not stay there to ask in a roundabout way for news. He would go in
straightforwardly and manfully to Grasmere. He would take the inmates
there by surprise. The sooner he could bring Tom's experience home
to himself, the better. He had schooled his heart to rely on that
experience, and it brought him back the old elasticity of his stride.
In his lofty carriage and buoyant face were again visible the old
haughtiness of the indifferentism that keeps itself aloof from the
turbulent emotions and conventional frivolities of those whom its
philosophy pities and scorns.

"Ha! ha!" laughed he who like Swift never laughed aloud, and often
laughed inaudibly. "Ha! ha! I shall exorcise the ghost of my grief. I
shall never be haunted again. If that stormy creature whom love might
have maddened into crime, if he were cured of love at once by a single
visit to the home of her whose face was changed to him,--for the smiles
and the tears of it had become the property of another man,--how much
more should I be left without a scar! I, the heir of the Chillinglys!
I, the kinsman of a Mivers! I, the pupil of a Welby! I--I, Kenelm
Chillingly, to be thus--thus--" Here, in the midst of his boastful
soliloquy, the well-remembered brook rushed suddenly upon eye and ear,
gleaming and moaning under the wintry moon. Kenelm Chillingly stopped,
covered his face with his hands, and burst into a passion