The Captain had no objection to offer to this very natural desire on the part of his adopted son; nor did he concern himself as to the young man's motive for leaving London.

Chapter VIII - Charlotte Prophesies Rain

*

Mr. Hawkehurst had no excuse for going to the Lawn before his departure; but the stately avenues between Bayswater and Kensington are free to any man; and, having nothing better to do, Valentine put a shabby little volume of Balzac in his pocket, and spent his last morning in town under the shadow of the mighty elms, reading one of the great Honoré's gloomiest romances, while the autumn leaves drifted round him, dancing fairy measures on the grass, and scraping and scuffling on the gravel, and while children with hoops and children with balls scampered and screamed in the avenue by which he sat. He was not particularly absorbed by his book. He had taken it haphazard from the tattered collection of cheap editions which he carried about with him in his wanderings, ignominiously stuffed into the bottom of a portmanteau, amongst boots and clothes-brushes and disabled razors.

"I'm sick of them all," he thought; "the De Beauseants, and Rastignacs, the German Jews, and the patrician beauties, and the Israelitish Circes of the Rue Taitbout, and the sickly self-sacrificing provincial angels, and the ghastly vieilles filles. Had that man ever seen such a woman as Charlotte, I wonder—a bright creature, all smiles and sunshine, and sweet impulsive tenderness; an angel who can be angelic without being poitrinaire, and whose amiability never degenerates into scrofula? There is an odour of the dissecting-room pervading all my friend Balzac's novels, and I don't think he was capable of painting a fresh, healthy nature. What a mass of disease he would have made Lucy Ashton, and with what dismal relish he would have dilated upon the physical sufferings of Amy Robsart in the confinement of Cumnor Hall! No, my friend Honoré, you are the greatest and grandest of painters of the terrible school; but the time comes when a man sighs for something brighter and better than your highest type of womanhood."

Mr. Hawkehurst put his book in his pocket, and abandoned himself to meditation, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his face buried in his hands, unconscious of the trundling hoops and screaming children.

"She is better and fairer than the fairest heroine of a novel," he thought. "She is like Heloise. Yes, the quaint old French fits her to a nicety:

'Elle ne fu oscure ne brune,
Ains fu clere comme la lune,
Envers qui les autres estoiles
Ressemblent petites chandoiles.'

Mrs. Browning must have known such a woman:

'Her air had a meaning, her movements a grace;
You turned from the fairest to gaze on her face;'

and yet

'She was not as pretty as women I know.'