It is probable that if Chudleigh Wilmot had remained in London, fulfilling his professional duties and leading his ordinary life, the declaration of love and the offer of his hand which in due course he would have made to Miss Kilsyth would have, for the first time, caused that young lady to avow the real state of her feelings towards him to herself. These feelings, beginning in gratitude, had passed into hero-worship, which is perhaps about as dangerous a phase both for adorer and adored as any in the whole category; showing as it does that the former must be considerably "far gone" before she could consent to exalt any man into an object of idolatry, and proving very perilous to the latter from the impossibility of his separating himself from the peculiar attributes which are supposed to call forth the devotion. And Wilmot was just such an idol as a girl like Madeleine ould place upon a pedestal and worship with constancy and fervour. The very fact that he possessed none of those qualifications so esteemed by and in the men by whom she was ordinarily surrounded was in her eyes a point in his favour. He did not hunt; he was an indifferent shot; he professed himself worse than a child at billiards, and his whist-playing was something atrocious. But then, for the best man across country, the straightest rider to hounds whom they knew, was Captain Severn, a slangy wretch only tolerated in society for his wife's sake. George Pitcairn was a splendid shot; but he had never heard of Tennyson, and would probably think that Browning was the name of a setter. Major Delapoche was the billiard champion at Kilsyth, where he was never seen out of the billiard-room, except at meal-times; and as for whist there could not be much in that when her father declared that there were not three men at Brookes's who could play so good a rubber as old Dr. M'Johns, the Presbyterian clergyman in the village. Ever since she had been emancipated from her governess, she had longed to meet some man of name and renown, who would take an interest in her, and whom she could reverence, admire, and look up to. She never pined for the heroes of the novels which she read, probably because she saw plenty of them in her ordinary life, and she was used to them and their ways. The big heavy dragoons of the _Guy-Livingstone_ type--by his portrayal of whom Mr. Lawrence establishes for himself such a reputation amongst the young ladies of the middle classes, who pine after the _beaux sabreurs_ and the "cool captains," principally because they have never met anyone in real life like them--are by no means such sources of raving among the girls accustomed to country-house and London-season society, who are familiar with something like the prototype of each character. Ronald's brother officers, Kilsyth's sporting friends, and Lady Muriel's connections, had made this kind of type too common for Madeleine, even if her temperament had not been very different, to elevate it into a hero;