"Ah, my mother," said Harley, with his most sad and quiet smile, "it is fated that we shall never agree. The first of our race is ever the one we are most proud of; and pray what ancestors had he? Beauty, virtue, modesty, intellect--if these are not nobility enough for a man, he is a slave to the dead." With these words Harley took up his hat and made toward the door. "You said yourself, '_Noblesse oblige_,'" said the Countess, following him to the threshold; "we have nothing more to add." Harley slightly shrugged his shoulders, kissed his mother's hand, whistled to Nero, who started up from a doze by the window, and went his way. "Does he really go abroad next week?" said the Earl. "So he says." "I am afraid there is no chance for Lady Mary," resumed Lord Lansmere, with a slight but melancholy smile. "She has not intellect enough to charm him. She is not worthy of Harley," said the proud mother. "Between you and me," rejoined the Earl, rather timidly, "I don't see what good his intellect does him. He could not be more unsettled and useless if he were the merest dunce in the three kingdoms. And so ambitious as he was when a boy! Catherine, I sometimes fancy that you know what changed him." "I! Nay, my dear Lord, it is a common change enough with the young, when of such fortunes; who find, when they enter life, that there is really little left for them to strive for. Had Harley been a poor man's son, it might have been different." "I was born to the same fortunes as Harley," said the Earl, shrewdly, "and yet I flatter myself I am of some use to old England." The Countess seized upon the occasion, complimented her Lord, and turned the subject. CHAPTER XVII. Harley spent his day in his usual desultory, lounging manner--dined in his quiet corner at his favorite club--Nero, not admitted into the club, patiently waited for him outside the door. The dinner over, dog and man, equally indifferent to the crowd, sauntered down that thoroughfare which, to the few who can comprehend the Poetry of London, has associations of glory and of woe sublime as any that the ruins of the dead elder world can furnish--thoroughfare that traverses what was once the courtyard of Whitehall, having to its left the site of the palace that lodged the royalty of Scotland--gains, through a narrow strait, that old isle of Thorney, in which Edward the Confessor received the ominous visit of the Conqueror--and, widening once more by the Abbey and the Hall of Westminster, then loses itself, like all memories of earthly grandeur amidst humble passages and mean defiles. Thus thought Harley L'Estrange--ever less amidst the actual world around him, than the images invoked by his own solitary soul--as he gained the Bridge, and saw the dull lifeless craft sleeping on the "Silent Way," once loud and glittering with the gilded barks of the antique Seignorie of England.