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.
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