The disclosure was a greater shock than he had expected from her keen and playful interest in matters of love and matrimony.  It was a revival of the mournful past, and she shed tears as she besought him not to be imprudent, to remember his poor father, and not rush into a hasty marriage.  He and his sister had been used to poverty, but it was different with Miss Conway.

He bitterly replied, that Lady Conway would take care they were not imprudent; and that instant the granny’s heart melted at the thought of his uncertain prospect, and at hearing of the struggles and sufferings that he had undergone.  They had not talked half an hour, before she had taken home Isabel Conway to her heart as a daughter, and flown in the face of all her wisdom, but assuring him that she well knew that riches had little to do with happiness, auguring an excellent living, and, with great sagacity, promising to settle the Terrace on his wife, and repeating, in perfect good faith, all the wonderful probabilities which her husband had seen in it forty years ago.

When Louis arrived, he found her alone, and divided between pride in her grandson’s conquest, and some anxiety on his own account, which took the form of asking him what he meant by saying that Isabel aimed higher than himself.

‘Did she not?’ said Louis; and with a sort of compunction for a playful allusion to the sacred calling, he turned it off with, ’Why, what do you think of Roland ap Dynasvawr ap Roland ap Gruffydd ap Rhys ap Morgan ap Llywellwyn ap Roderic ap Caradoc ap Arthur ap Uther ap Pendragon?’ running this off with calm, slow, impressive deliberation.

’Certify me, Louis dear, before I can quite rejoice, that this fun is not put on.’

’Did you think me an arrant dissembler?  No, indeed:  before I guessed how it was with them, I had found out—­Oh!  Aunt Kitty, shall I ever get Mary to believe in me, after the ridiculous way in which I have behaved to her?’

‘Is this what you really mean?’

’Indeed it is.  The very presence of Isabel could not keep me from recurring to her; and at home, not a room, not a scene, but is replete with recollections of all that she was to me last year!  And that I should only understand it when half the world is between us!  How mad I was!  How shall I ever persuade her to forget my past folly?  Past!  Nay, folly and inconsistency are blended in all I do, and now they have lost me the only person who could help me to conquer them!  And now she is beyond my reach, and I shall never be worthy of her.’

He was much agitated.  The sight of James’s success, and the return to his solitary home, had stirred up his feelings very strongly; and he needed his aunt’s fond soothing and sympathy—­but it was not difficult to comfort and cheer him.  His disposition was formed more for affection than passion, and his attachment to Mary was of a calmer nature than his fiery cousin would have allowed to be love.  It took a good deal of working-up to make it outwardly affect his spirits or demeanour, in general, it served only as an ingredient in the pensiveness that pervaded all his moods, even his most arrant nonsense.