"You are an enigma--but I will take pains and not rest till I solve you." "I defy you." "Thanks--better defy than despise. "Oh, you must be strangely altered, if I can despise you." "Indeed! what do you remember of me?" "That you were frank, bold, and therefore, I suppose, true!--that you shocked my aunts and my father by your contempt for the vulgar hypocrisies of our conventional life. Oh, no! I cannot despise you." Lumley raised his eyes to those of Florence--he gazed on her long and earnestly--ambitious hopes rose high within him. "My fair cousin," said he, in an altered and serious tone, "I see something in your spirit kindred to mine; and I am glad that yours is one of the earliest voices which confirm my new resolves on my return to busy England!" "And those resolves?" "Are an Englishman's--energetic and ambitious." "Alas, ambition! How many false portraits are there of the great original!" Lumley thought he had found a clue to the heart of his cousin, and he began to expatiate, with unusual eloquence, on the nobleness of that daring sin which "lost angels heaven." Florence listened to him with attention, but not with sympathy. Lumley was deceived. His was not an ambition that could attract the fastidious but high-souled Idealist. The selfishness of his nature broke out in all the sentiments that he fancied would seem to her most elevated. Place--power--titles--all these objects were low and vulgar to one who saw them daily at her feet. At a distance the Duke of ------ continued from time to time to direct his cold gaze at Florence. He did not like her the less for not seeming to court him. He had something generous within him, and could understand her. He went away at last, and thought seriously of Florence as a wife. Not a wife for companionship, for friendship, for love; but a wife who could take the trouble of rank off his hands--do him honour, and raise him an heir, whom he might flatter himself would be his own.