’Think no harm of Livia.  She is bent upon my worldly advantage, and that is plain even to the person rejecting it.  How much more so must it be to papa, though he likes you, and when you are near him would perhaps, in a fit of unworldliness, be almost as reckless as the creature he calls madcap and would rather call countess.  No! sooner with a Will-o’-the-wisp, my friend.  Who could ever know where the man was when he himself never knows where he is.  He is the wind that bloweth as it listeth—­ because it is without an aim or always with a new one.  And am I the one to direct him?  I need direction.  My lord and sovereign must fix my mind.  I am volatile, earthly, not to be trusted if I do not worship.  He himself said to me that—­he reads our characters.  “Nothing but a proved hero will satisfy Henrietta,” his words!  And the hero must be shining like a beacon-fire kept in a blaze.  Quite true; I own it.  Is Chillon Kirby satisfied?  He ought to be.

’But oh!—­to be yoked is an insufferable thought, unless we name all the conditions.  But to be yoked to a creature of impulses!  Really I could only describe his erratic nature by commending you to the study of a dragon-fly.  It would map you an idea of what he has been in the twenty-four hours since we had him here.  They tell me a vain sort of person is the cause.  Can she be the cause of his resolving to have a residence here, to buy up half the valley—­erecting a royal palace—­and marking out the site—­raving about it in the wildest language, poetical if it had been a little reasonable—­and then, after a night, suddenly, unaccountably, hating the place, and being under the necessity of flying from it in hot haste, tearing us all away, as if we were attached to a kite that will neither mount nor fall, but rushes about headlong.  Has he heard, or suspected? or seen certain boxes bearing a name?  Livia has no suspicion, though she thinks me wonderfully contented in so dull a place, where it has rained nine days in a fortnight.  I ask myself whether my manner of greeting him betrayed my expectation of another.  He has brains.  It is the greatest of errors to suppose him at all like the common run of rich young noblemen.  He seems to thirst for brilliant wits and original sayings.  His ambition is to lead all England in everything!  I readily acknowledge that he has generous ideas too; but try to hold him, deny him his liberty, and it would be seen how desperate and relentless he would be to get loose.  Of this I am convinced:  he would be either the most abject of lovers, or a woman (if it turned out not to be love) would find him the most unscrupulous of yoke-fellows.  Yoke-fellow!  She would not have her reason in consenting.  A lamb and a furious bull!  Papa and I have had a serious talk.  He shuts his ears to my comparisons, but admits, that as I am the principal person concerned, etc.  Rich and a nobleman is too tempting for an anxious father; and Livia’s influence