firmly set on the ground as a church-tower. And while, on the dullest
of dull questions, Audley Egerton thus, not too lively himself, enforced
attention, where was Harley L'Estrange? Standing alone by the river
at Richmond, and murmuring low fantastic thoughts as he gazed on the
moonlit tide.

When Audley left him at home he had joined his parents, made them gay
with his careless gayety, seen the old-fashioned folks retire to
rest, and then--while they, perhaps, deemed him once more the hero of
ball-rooms and the cynosure of clubs--he drove slowly through the soft
summer night, amidst the perfumes of many a garden and many a gleaming
chestnut grove, with no other aim before him than to reach the loveliest
margin of England's loveliest river, at the hour when the moon was
fullest and the song of the nightingale most sweet. And so eccentric a
humourist was this man, that I believe, as he there loitered,--no one
near to cry "How affected!" or "How romantic!"--he enjoyed himself
more than if he had been exchanging the politest "how-d'ye-dos" in the
hottest of London drawing-rooms, or betting his hundreds on the odd
trick, with Lord de R------ for his partner.

CHAPTER VII.

Leonard had been about six weeks with his uncle, and those weeks
were well spent. Mr. Richard had taken him to his counting-house, and
initiated him into business and the mysteries of double entry; and in
return for the young man's readiness and zeal in matters which the
acute trader instinctively felt were not exactly to his tastes, Richard
engaged the best master the town afforded to read with his nephew in the
evening. This gentleman was the head usher of a large school, who had
his hours to himself after eight o'clock, and was pleased to vary the
dull routine of enforced lessons by instructions to a pupil who took
delightedly even to the Latin grammar. Leonard made rapid strides, and
learned more in those six weeks than many a cleverish boy does in twice
as many months. These hours which Leonard devoted to study Richard
usually spent from home,--sometimes at the houses of his grand
acquaintances in the Abbey Gardens, sometimes in the Reading-Room
appropriated to those aristocrats. If he stayed at home, it was in
company with his head clerk, and for the purpose of checking his
account-books, or looking over the names of doubtful electors.

Leonard had naturally wished to communicate his altered prospects to his
old friends, that they, in tu