avers, favoured, as
Sir Peter had learned, by her father, rejected as yet by herself, were
somehow inseparably mixed up in Sir Peter's mind and his words, as he
sought to kindle his son's emulation. He dwelt on the obligations which
a country imposed on its citizens, especially on the young and vigorous
generation to which the destinies of those to follow were intrusted;
and with these stern obligations he combined all the cheering and tender
associations which an English public man connects with an English home:
the wife with a smile to soothe the cares, and a mind to share the
aspirations, of a life that must go through labour to achieve renown;
thus, in all he said, binding together, as if they could not be
disparted, Ambition and Cecilia.

His son did not interrupt him by a word, Sir Peter in his eagerness not
noticing that Kenelm had drawn him aside from the direct thoroughfare,
and had now made halt in the middle of Westminster bridge, bending
over the massive parapet and gazing abstractedly upon the waves of
the starlit river. On the right the stately length of the people's
legislative palace, so new in its date, so elaborately in each detail
ancient in its form, stretching on towards the lowly and jagged roofs of
penury and crime. Well might these be so near to the halls of a people's
legislative palace: near to the heart of every legislator for a people
must be the mighty problem how to increase a people's splendour and its
virtue, and how to diminish its penury and its crime.

"How strange it is," said Kenelm, still bending over the parapet,
"that throughout all my desultory wanderings I have ever been attracted
towards the sight and the sound of running waters, even those of the
humblest rill! Of what thoughts, of what dreams, of what memories,
colouring the history of my past, the waves of the humblest rill could
speak, were the waves themselves not such supreme philosophers,--roused
indeed on their surface, vexed by a check to their own course, but so
indifferent to all that makes gloom or death to the mortals who think
and dream and feel beside their banks."

"Bless me," said Peter to himself, "the boy has got back to his old vein
of humours and melancholies. He has not heard a word I have been saying.
Travers is right. He will never do anything in life. Why did I christen
him Kenelm? he might as well have been christened Peter." Still, loth
to own that his eloquence had been expended in vain and that th