CHAPTER XXVIII.

WHAT HAD HAPPENED AT HOME.

JOST naturally do people fear to revisit. home after any considerable absence,

especially when they have had little or no news from their friends during that absence. It is rarely, indeed, that you find the home circle the same as when you left it. If circumstances have but little changed, the people themselves have changed; or if not, there are few persons of that constant mind and equable nature that you can take them up, as it were, exactly at the point at which you left them.

In our story the circumstances had greatly changed. Charles Ashurst had become the acknowledged lover of Lady Alice. This fact was

not likely to surprise any of the travellers, and would not be displeasing to any of them. It is true that Ruth had imagined a larger career and a wider sphere of action for her cousin Alice than she was likely to have when married to Ashurst; but Ruth knew the young man's worth, and was too much in love herself to be in the least degree censorious about the loves of other people. The engagement, therefore, of Lady Alice and Charles Ashurst was not a thing which would surprise or grieve any one of the returning party. But there was much which had taken place in Mr. Thurston's quiet household which would be a cause of great grief and suffering to one of the party of our travellers-one who has throughout this story played not the most selfish or ignoble part.

There is hardly anything in which families differ more than in their love affairs. There are

families, from the highest to the lowest, who, when you come to know long reaches of their

family history, are uniformly successful in these

matters:

"Tu, felix, Austria, nube."

And there are other families, such as the Tudors and the Stuarts, who are as uniformly unsuccessful. The Lochawes belonged to the latter class; and for the three preceding generations the marriages, though well intended and not ill arranged as regards worldly affairs, had not been felicitous as regards the happiness of the individuals principally concerned. It seemed as if Lord Glenant was fated to partake the misfortune that had, for so long a time, beset his family in this respect. Most people would say that his falling in love with Maggie was a great misfortune; but I do not think that it should be so regarded, if only that love had met with a return. It may have surprised the reader that, after loving such a person as his cousin Ruth, Glenant should have become so suddenly enamoured of Maggie; but, as it has frequently been remarked before, the heart has often been caught in the rebound. In both instances Lord Glenant, who was somewhat of an eccentric person, was attracted by a character which was very different from that of most other

women.

And in both instances he was foiled by the women he loved meeting with characters much more extraordinary, at least at first appearance, than his own.

Had Glenant possessed a more profound knowledge of that world which he supposed himself to know so well, he would never have been contented to leave Maggie under the roof of, and in daily conversation with, such a man as Mr. Thurston.

The poet Coleridge said that "the love of the man was for the woman, but the love of the woman was for the love of the man.” This is surely a profound saying, and indicates an extraordinary insight into the different nature of love in men and women. Yet it does not appear that Coleridge had any great experience in matters of love; but a little experience goes so long a way with a great man. With him it is, as it were, a little seed put into his mind, which assimilates to itself something of all which comes near to it; whereas, with ordinary men, their experience is only so much property, which is liable rather to be diminished than increased by

the length of time during which it has been

kept.

Women certainly are superior to men in the ideal which they form of love, in their constancy, and in their disregard of physical advantages. The fact can be no longer concealed that Maggie was rapidly falling in love with her master and tutor, Mr. Thurston; and this love was of the highest kind, being the tenderest admiration for the greatness of the man and for the immense discursiveness of his mind. To live in the same house with a careless, slovenly scholar is not generally the way to become enamoured of him; but Maggie's love was of that deep kind, especially of that feminine kind, which looks but little to external surroundings. And, indeed, both with men and women, there is more fascination exercised by the powers of speech than by almost anything else.

It was not without some

reason that Wilkes, an

ugly little man, said that

he was only half an hour behind the handsomest

man in England in his chance of gaining the affections of any woman.