No, no, my gentle friend, there are other reasons.  I could not make my abode in Lady Belamour’s house, while in that of my nephew, my natural home, I have a right to drag out what remains of the existence of mine.  Nay, are you weeping, my sweet child?  That must not be; your young life must take no darkness from mine.  Even should Lady Belamour’s arbitrary caprice bear you off without another meeting, remember that you have given me many more happy hours than I ever supposed to be in store for me, and have opened doors which shall not be closed again.”

“You will get some one to recite to you?” entreated Aurelia, her voice most unsteady.

“Godfrey shall seek out some poor scholar or exhausted poetaster, with a proviso that he never inflicts his own pieces on me,” said Mr. Belamour, in a tone more as if he wished to console her than as it were a pleasing prospect.  “Never fear, gentle monitress, I will not sink into the stagnation from which your voice awoke me.  Neither Godfrey nor my nephew would allow it.  Come, let us put it from our minds.  It has always been my experience, that whatever I expected from my much admired sister-in-law, that was the exact reverse of what she actually did.  Therefore let us attend to topics, though I wager that you have no fresh acquisitions for me to-day.”

“I am ashamed, sir, but I could not fix my mind even to a most frightful description of wolves in Mr. Thomson’s ‘Winter.’”

“That were scarcely a soothing subject; but we might find calm in something less agitating and more familiar.  Perhaps you can recall something too firmly imprinted on your memory to be disturbed by these emotions.”

Aurelia bethought herself that she must not disappoint her friend on what might prove their last evening; she began very unsteadily:—­

“’ Hence, loathed Melancholy.’”

However by the time “Jonson’s learned sock” was on, her mechanical repetition had become animated, and she had restored herself to equanimity.  When the clock struck nine, her auditor added his thanks, “In case we should not meet again thus, let me beg of my kind visitor to wear this ring in memory of one to whom she has brought a breath indeed from L’Allegro itself.  It will not be too large.  It was made for a lady.”

And amid her tearful thanks she felt a light kiss on her fingers, revealing to her that the hermit must possess a beard, a fact, which in the close-shaven Hanoverian days, conveyed a sense of squalor and neglect almost amounting to horror.

In her own room she dropped many a tear over the ring, which was of course the Cupid intaglio, and she spent the night in strange mixed dreams and yearnings, divided between her father, Betty, and Eugene on the one hand, and Mr. Belamour and the children on the other.  Home-sick as she sometimes felt, dull as Bowstead was, she should be sadly grieved to leave those to whom she felt herself almost necessary, though her choice must needs be for her home.