“Will you not try the stream to-day, sir? Take my rod.” Kenelm remembered that Lily had called Izaak Walton’s book “a cruel one,” and shaking his head gently, went his way into the house. There he seated himself silently by the window, and looked towards the grassy lawn and the dipping willows, and the gleam of the white walls through the girdling trees, as he had looked the eve before. “Ah!” he murmured at last, “if, as I hold, a man but tolerably good does good unconsciously merely by the act of living,--if he can no more traverse his way from the cradle to the grave, without letting fall, as he passes, the germs of strength, fertility, and beauty, than can a reckless wind or a vagrant bird, which, where it passes, leaves behind it the oak, the corn-sheaf, or the flower,--ah, if that be so, how tenfold the good must be, if the man find the gentler and purer duplicate of his own being in that mysterious, undefinable union which Shakspeares and day-labourers equally agree to call love; which Newton never recognizes, and which Descartes (his only rival in the realms of thought at once severe and imaginative) reduces into links of early association, explaining that he loved women who squinted, because, when he was a boy, a girl with that infirmity squinted at him from the other side of his father’s garden-wall! Ah! be this union between man and woman what it may; if it be really love, really the bond which embraces the innermost and bettermost self of both,--how daily, hourly, momently, should we bless God for having made it so easy to be happy and to be good!” CHAPTER VI. THE dinner-party at Mr. Braefield’s was not quite so small as Kenelm had anticipated. When the merchant heard from his wife that Kenelm was coming, he thought it would be but civil to the young gentleman to invite a few other persons to meet him. “You see, my dear,” he said to Elsie, “Mrs. Cameron is a very good, simple sort of woman, but not particularly amusing; and Lily, though a pretty girl, is so exceedingly childish. We owe much, my sweet Elsie, to this Mr. Chillingly,”--here there was a deep tone of feeling in his voice and look,--“and we must make it as pleasant for him as we can. I will bring down my friend Sir Thomas, and you ask Mr. Emlyn and his wife. Sir Thomas is a very sensible man, and Emlyn a very learned one. So Mr. Chillingly will find people worth talking to. By the by, when I go to town I will send down a haunch of venison from Groves’s.” So when Kenelm arrived, a little before six o’clock, he found in the drawing-room the Rev. Charles Emlyn, vicar of Moleswich proper, with his spouse, and a portly middle-aged man, to whom, as Sir Thomas Pratt, Kenelm was introduced. Sir Thomas was an eminent city banker. The ceremonies of introduction over, Kenelm stole to Elsie’s side. “I thought I was to meet Mrs. Cameron. I don’t see her.”