ut the popular, animated, pleasant George Belvoir, who she knew by
womanly instinct was as much in love with her as he could be.

Cecilia Travers that night on retiring to rest told her maid, smilingly,
that she was too tired to have her hair done; and yet, when the maid
was dismissed, she looked at herself in the glass more gravely and more
discontentedly than she had ever looked there before; and, tired though
she was, stood at the window gazing into the moonlit night for a good
hour after the maid left her.

CHAPTER XV.

KENELM CHILLINGLY has now been several days a guest at Neesdale Park.
He has recovered speech; the other guests have gone, including George
Belvoir. Leopold Travers has taken a great fancy to Kenelm. Leopold
was one of those men, not uncommon perhaps in England, who, with great
mental energies, have little book-knowledge, and when they come
in contact with a book-reader who is not a pedant feel a pleasant
excitement in his society, a source of interest in comparing notes with
him, a constant surprise in finding by what venerable authorities the
deductions which their own mother-wit has drawn from life are supported,
or by what cogent arguments derived from books those deductions are
contravened or upset. Leopold Travers had in him that sense of humour
which generally accompanies a strong practical understanding (no man,
for instance, has more practical understanding than a Scot, and no man
has a keener susceptibility to humour), and not only enjoyed Kenelm's
odd way of expressing himself, but very often mistook Kenelm's irony for
opinion spoken in earnest.

Since his early removal from the capital and his devotion to
agricultural pursuits, it was so seldom that Leopold Travers met a man
by whose conversation his mind was diverted to other subjects than those
which were incidental to the commonplace routine of his life that he
found in Kenelm's views of men and things a source of novel amusement,
and a stirring appeal to such metaphysical creeds of his own as had been
formed unconsciously, and had long reposed unexamined in the recesses of
an intellect shrewd and strong, but more accustomed to dictate than to
argue. Kenelm, on his side, saw much in his host to like and to admire;
but, reversing their relative positions in point of years, he conversed
with Travers as with a mind younger than his own. Indeed, it was one
of his crotchety theories that each generation is in substance mentally
olde