Here the minstrel halted; and Kenelm with a certain tremble in his voice, said, “Is it not time that we should make ourselves known to each other by name? I have no longer any cause to conceal mine, indeed I never had any cause stronger than whim,--Kenelm Chillingly, the only son of Sir Peter, of Exmundham, -----shire.” “I wish your father joy of so clever a son,” said the minstrel with his wonted urbanity. “You already know enough of me to be aware that I am of much humbler birth and station than you; but if you chance to have visited the exhibition of the Royal Academy this year--ah! I understand that start--you might have recognized a picture of which you have seen the rudimentary sketch, ‘The Girl with the Flower-ball,’ one of three pictures very severely handled by ‘The Londoner,’ but, in spite of that potent enemy, insuring fortune and promising fame to the wandering minstrel, whose name, if the sight of the pictures had induced you to inquire into that, you would have found to be Walter Melville. Next January I hope, thanks to that picture, to add, ‘Associate of the Royal Academy.’ The public will not let them keep me out of it, in spite of ‘The Londoner.’ You are probably an expected guest at one of the more imposing villas from which we see the distant lights. I am going to a very humble cottage, in which henceforth I hope to find my established home. I am there now only for a few days, but pray let me welcome you there before I leave. The cottage is called Grasmere.” CHAPTER VI. THE minstrel gave a cordial parting shake of the hand to the fellow-traveller whom he had advised to settle down, not noticing how very cold had become the hand in his own genial grasp. Lightly he passed over the wooden bridge, preceded by Max, and merrily, when he had gained the other side of the bridge, came upon Kenelm’s ear, through the hush of the luminous night, the verse of the uncompleted love-song,-- “Singing, singing, Lustily singing, Down the road, with his dogs before, Came the Ritter of Nierestein.” Love-song, uncompleted; why uncompleted? It was not given to Kenelm to divine the why. It was a love-song versifying one of the prettiest fairy tales in the world, which was a great favourite with Lily, and which Lion had promised Lily to versify, but only to complete it in her presence and to her perfect satisfaction. CHAPTER VII. IF I could not venture to place upon paper the exact words of an eloquent coveter of fame, the earth-born, still less can I dare to place upon paper all that passed through the voiceless heart of a coveter of love, the heaven-born. From the hour in which Kenelm Chillingly had parted from Walter Melville until somewhere between sunrise and noon the next day, the summer joyousness of that external Nature which does now and then, though, for the most part, deceitfully, address to the soul of man questions and answers all her soulless own, laughed away the gloom of his misgivings.