"Thank you. But you still misconstrue me. I do not think that Lily cares half so much for Mr. Chillingly as she does for a new butterfly. I do not fear their coming together, as you call it, in the light in which she now regards him, and in which, from all I observe, he regards her. My only fear is that a hint might lead her to regard him in another way, and that way impossible." Elsie left the house extremely bewildered, and with a profound contempt for Mrs. Cameron's knowledge of what may happen to two young persons "brought together." CHAPTER XVII. NOW, on that very day, and about the same hour in which the conversation just recorded between Elsie and Mrs. Cameron took place, Kenelm, in his solitary noonday wanderings, entered the burial-ground in which Lily had some short time before surprised him. And there he found her, standing beside the flower border which she had placed round the grave of the child whom she had tended and nursed in vain. The day was cloudless and sunless; one of those days that so often instil a sentiment of melancholy into the heart of an English summer. "You come here too often, Miss Mordaunt," said Kenelm, very softly, as he approached. Lily turned her face to him, without any start of surprise, with no brightening change in its pensive expression,--an expression rare to the mobile play of her features. "Not too often. I promised to come as often as I could; and, as I told you before, I have never broken a promise yet." Kenelm made no answer. Presently the girl turned from the spot, and Kenelm followed her silently till she halted before the old tombstone with its effaced inscription. "See," she said, with a faint smile, "I have put fresh flowers there. Since the day we met in this churchyard, I have thought so much of that tomb, so neglected, so forgotten, and--" she paused a moment, and went on abruptly, "do you not often find that you are much too--what is the word? ah! too egotistical, considering and pondering and dreaming greatly too much about yourself?" "Yes, you are right there; though, till you so accused me, my conscience did not detect it." "And don't you find that you escape from being so haunted by the thought of yourself, when you think of the dead? they can never have any share in your existence /here/. When you say, 'I shall do this or that to-day;' when you dream, 'I may be this or that to-morrow,' you are thinking and dreaming, all by yourself, for yourself. But you are out of yourself, beyond yourself, when you think and dream of the dead, who can have nothing to do with your to-day or your to-morrow." As we all know, Kenelm Chillingly made it one of the rules of his life never to be taken by surprise. But when the speech I have written down came from the lips of that tamer of butterflies, he was so startled that all it occurred to him to say, after a long pause, was,--