"You must not stand here. The lady will keep her promise, you may be sure. Now then!"
The child turned sorrowfully away, and the click of her pattens was heard on the stone pavement getting fainter and fainter in the distance.
Leslie Travers was thoughtful beyond the average of the young men of his type in those days, and as Miss Herschel's servant shut the door—much wondering what all the delay had been about—he gathered his loose cloak round him, and walked towards the house his mother had taken in King Street, pondering much on the inequalities of life.
"Some star-gazing," he thought, "and with their chief aims set above the heavens; some singing and dancing; some working mischief—deadly mischief—by their lives; and some, like that poor child, dying of starvation. Yes, and some are praying to God for the safety of their own souls, or thanking Him that they are safe, and forgetting, as it seems, the souls of others—nay, that they have souls at all! And others, like that angel, whose face is like the fair lady of Dante's dream, or vision, seem to draw the beholder upward by the very force of their own purity and beauty."
This may sound very high-flown language for a lover, but Leslie Travers lived in a day of ornate expression of sentiment, as the effusions in Lady Miller's vase at Batheaston abundantly testified.
Leslie Travers was the son of a Lincolnshire squire, who owned a few acres, and had lived the isolated life of the country gentlemen of those times.
Leslie was the only son, and he had been sent to Cambridge; but his health failed before he had finished his course there, and he had returned to his old home just in time to see his father die of the ague, which haunted the neighbourhood of the fens before any attempt at proper drainage had been thought of, much less made.
Mrs. Travers was urged to shut up the Grange—which answered very well to the description of a moated Grange of a later time—and resort to Bath, for the healing waters might take their effect on her son's health. Mrs. Travers had now been resident in Bath for a whole year, and her figure in widow's-weeds was familiar in the bath-room waiting for her son's appearance after his morning douche.
But not only was her figure familiar in the bath-room, there was another place where she constantly took up her position, and where she could not persuade her son to follow her, and that place was the chapel which had been built by Selina, Countess of Huntingdon.
Mrs. Travers was at this time greatly exercised in mind about her son. Since his health had improved, he had entered more into the gaieties of the city of Bath, and made friends of whom she could not approve. The Pump Room was a place where many idlers and votaries of fashion found a convenient resort after the morning bath; and here many introductions were exchanged between the new-comers and those who had been frequenters of Bath for many previous seasons. The present master of the ceremonies did not hold the sway of his famous predecessor; but outward decorum was preserved; and it was in the master's power to refuse or grant an introduction if it was objected to by any parent or guardian.