CHAPTER XIV.
SOMEWHAT more than another year has rolled away. It is early spring in London. The trees in the park and squares are budding into leaf and blossom. Leopold Travers has had a brief but serious conversation with his daughter, and now gone forth on horseback. Handsome and graceful still, Leopold Travers when in London is pleased to find himself scarcely less the fashion with the young than he was when himself in youth. He is now riding along the banks of the Serpentine, no one better mounted, better dressed, better looking, or talking with greater fluency on the topics which interest his companions.
Cecilia is in the smaller drawing-room, which is exclusively appropriated to her use, alone with Lady Glenalvon.
LADY GLENALVON.—“I own, my dear, dear Cecilia, that I arrange myself at last on the side of your father. How earnestly at one time I had hoped that Kenelm Chillingly might woo and win the bride that seemed to me most fitted to adorn and to cheer his life, I need not say. But when at Exmundham he asked me to befriend his choice of another, to reconcile his mother to that choice,—evidently not a suitable one,—I gave him up. And though that affair is at an end, he seems little likely ever to settle down to practical duties and domestic habits, an idle wanderer over the face of the earth, only heard of in remote places and with strange companions. Perhaps he may never return to England.”
CECILIA.—“He is in England now, and in London.”
LADY GLENALVON.—“You amaze me! Who told you so?”
CECILIA.—“His father, who is with him. Sir Peter called yesterday, and spoke to me so kindly.” Cecilia here turned aside her face to conceal the tears that had started to her eyes.
LADY GLENALVON.—“Did Mr. Travers see Sir Peter?”
CECILIA.—“Yes; and I think it was something that passed between them which made my father speak to me—for the first time—almost sternly.”