"I was thinking of the future." "Meaning your own future. Why, at your age the future ought to be a most radiant vision." "Indeed it is not that. It is all clouds and darkness. I do not see that one must needs be happy because one is young. There has been very little happiness in my life yet awhile, only the dreary monotonous routine of boarding-school." "But all that is over now, and life is just beginning for you. I wish I were eighteen instead of eight-and-twenty." "Would you live your life over again?" The traveller laughed. "That's putting a home question," he said. "Well, perhaps not exactly the same life, though it has not been a bad one. But I should like the feeling of perfect youth, the sense of having one's full inheritance of life lying at one's banker's, as it were, and being able to draw upon the account a little recklessly, indifferent as to the waste of a year or two. You see I have come to a period of existence in which a man has to calculate his resources. If I do not find happiness within the next five years, I am never likely to find it at all. At three-and-thirty a man has done with a heart, in a moral and poetic sense, and begins to entertain vague alarms on the subject of fatty degeneration." Clarissa smiled faintly, as if the stranger's idle talk scarcely beguiled her from her own thoughts. "You said you had been at Arden," she began rather abruptly; "then you must know papa." "No, I have not the honour to know Mr. Lovel," with the same embarrassed air which he had exhibited before in speaking of Arden Court. "But I am acquainted--or I was acquainted, rather, for he and I have not met for some time--with one member of your family, a Mr. Austin Lovel." "My brother," Clarissa said quickly, and with a sudden shadow upon her face. "Your brother; yes, I supposed as much." "Poor Austin! It is very sad. Papa and he are ill friends. There was some desperate quarrel between them a few years ago; I do not even know what about; and Austin was turned out of doors, never to come back any more. Papa told me nothing about it, though it was the common talk at Holborough. It was only from a letter of my aunt's that I learnt what had happened; and I am never to speak of Austin when I go home, my aunt told me."