“Pooh! my dear Chillingly, we cannot run away from the age in which we live: we must accept its conditions and make the best of them; and if the House of Commons be nothing else, it is a famous debating society and a capital club. Think over it. I must leave you now. I am going to see a picture at the Exhibition which has been most truculently criticised in ‘The Londoner,’ but which I am assured, on good authority, is a work of remarkable merit. I can’t bear to see a man snarled and sneered down, no doubt by jealous rivals, who have their influence in journals, so I shall judge of the picture for myself. If it be really as good as I am told, I shall talk about it to everybody I meet; and in matters of art I fancy my word goes for something. Study art, my dear Kenelm. No gentleman’s education is complete if he does n’t know a good picture from a bad one. After the Exhibition I shall just have time for a canter round the Park before the debate of the session, which begins to-night.” With a light step the young man quitted the room, humming an air from the “Figaro” as he descended the stairs. From the window Kenelm watched him swinging himself with careless grace into his saddle and riding briskly down the street,--in form and face and bearing a very model of young, high-born, high-bred manhood. “The Venetians,” muttered Kenelm, “decapitated Marino Faliero for conspiring against his own order,--the nobles. The Venetians loved their institutions, and had faith in them. Is there such love and such faith among the English?” As he thus soliloquized he heard a shrilling sort of squeak; and a showman stationed before his window the stage on which Punch satirizes the laws and moralities of the world, “kills the beadle and defies the devil.” CHAPTER X. KENELM turned from the sight of Punch and Punch’s friend the cur, as his servant, entering, said a person from the country, who would not give his name, asked to see him. Thinking it might be some message from his father, Kenelm ordered the stranger to be admitted, and in another minute there entered a young man of handsome countenance and powerful frame, in whom, after a surprised stare, Kenelm recognized Tom Bowles. Difficult indeed would have been that recognition to an unobservant beholder: no trace was left of the sullen bully or the village farrier; the expression of the face was mild and intelligent,--more bashful than hardy; the brute strength of the form had lost its former clumsiness, the simple dress was that of a gentleman,--to use an expressive idiom, the whole man was wonderfully “toned down.” “I am afraid, sir, I am taking a liberty,” said Tom, rather nervously, twiddling his hat between his fingers.