“I think you may be sure of that,” said
Kenelm. “Miss Travers has too much mind.”
“Yes, at present; but did you not say that in
love people go out of their mind?”
“True! I forgot that.”
“I am not then disposed to dismiss poor George’s
offer with a decided negative, and yet it would be
unfair to mislead him by encouragement. In fact,
I’ll be hanged if I know how to reply.”
“You think Miss Travers does not dislike George
Belvoir, and if she saw more of him may like him better,
and it would be good for her as well as for him not
to put an end to that, chance?”
“Exactly so.”
“Why not then write: ’My dear George,—You
have my best wishes, but my daughter does not seem
disposed to marry at present. Let me consider
your letter not written, and continue on the same terms
as we were before.’ Perhaps, as George
knows Virgil, you might find your own schoolboy recollections
of that poet useful here, and add, Varium et mutabile
semper femina; hackneyed, but true.”
“My dear Chillingly, your suggestion is capital.
How the deuce at your age have you contrived to know
the world so well?”
Kenelm answered in the pathetic tones so natural to
his voice, “By being only a looker-on; alas!”
Leopold Travers felt much relieved after he had written
his reply to George. He had not been quite so
ingenuous in his revelation to Chillingly as he may
have seemed. Conscious, like all proud and fond
fathers, of his daughter’s attractions, he was
not without some apprehension that Kenelm himself
might entertain an ambition at variance with that
of George Belvoir: if so, he deemed it well to
put an end to such ambition while yet in time:
partly because his interest was already pledged to
George; partly because, in rank and fortune, George
was the better match; partly because George was of
the same political party as himself,—while
Sir Peter, and probably Sir Peter’s heir, espoused
the opposite side; and partly also because, with all
his personal liking to Kenelm, Leopold Travers, as
a very sensible, practical man of the world, was not
sure that a baronet’s heir who tramped the country
on foot in the dress of a petty farmer, and indulged
pugilistic propensities in martial encounters with
stalwart farriers, was likely to make a safe husband
and a comfortable son-in-law. Kenelm’s
words, and still more his manner, convinced Travers
that any apprehensions of rivalry that he had previously
conceived were utterly groundless.
THE same evening, after dinner (during that lovely
summer month they dined at Neesdale Park at an unfashionably
early hour), Kenelm, in company with Travers and Cecilia,
ascended a gentle eminence at the back of the gardens,
on which there were some picturesque ivy-grown ruins
of an ancient priory, and commanding the best view
of a glorious sunset and a subject landscape of vale
and wood, rivulet and distant hills.
