This was how Ben Renton went out upon the world,--in charity with his own people, even with his father who had been so hard upon him; and feeling, after all, that at five-and-twenty a man, even when disinherited, with work in his hands to occupy him, fresh air to breathe, and novel scenes to see, and energies to exercise in a big spacious world where there was room to do something, had no particular occasion to quarrel with life or fate. The thread of actual work, as soon as he got it into his hands, had enabled him to trace his way out of all the morbid labyrinths of solitary musing. Armida’s garden was left behind for ever; but the witch, who had enchanted him and possessed herself of his life, was so far from suffering by the change, that she had developed in his imagination into a white angelic woman, worthy reward of all labour. Poor, foolish Ben! And yet it could not have been anything but a high nature which emerged from that six months’ mist of self-inspection, bitterness, idleness, and insane passion, with at least a true sense of the realities of his position, and a true love in his heart. And thus equipped he disappears from us for seven years into the vast and troubled world. CHAPTER XV. KENSINGTON GORE. Laurence Renton’s state of mind when he left the Manor immediately after his father’s death was very different from that of his brother Ben. He was a different man altogether, as will be seen. He had that unconscious natural generosity of temper and unselfishness of disposition which is more a woman’s quality than a man’s. By instinct, he put himself, as it were, on the secondary level, and considered matters in general rather as they affected other people. It was no virtue in him, and he did not even know it. Such a disposition could scarcely have existed with a passionate or energetic mind; and Laurie was not energetic. He could no more have absorbed himself in a foolish passion as Ben had done, than he could have set to work with the practical sense of his younger brother. He was lazy Laurence under all circumstances; fond of philosophising over his mischances, taking most things very quietly; and he had a faculty of contenting himself with what was pleasant in whatsoever aspect it might come, which is the very death of ambition in every shape and form. He had occupied some rooms at Kensington, with a pretty studio attached to them, in his father’s lifetime, when money was plentiful. No wonder Mrs. Westbury had mourned over him, and denounced so luxurious a mode of bringing up. He was of course a younger son, and had no pretensions to lead an idle life. Providence seemed indeed to have indicated a public office, or some such moderate occupation, which would have left him time for his favourite dilettantism and required no particular activity or exercise of intellect. But Laurence had been a perplexing subject to deal with all his life. He had been one of those trying boys who have no particular bent one way or another.