once gives himself up to the care and improvement of a landed estate,
he has no time and no heart for anything else. An estate is an income
or a kingdom, according as the owner chooses to take it. I take it as
a kingdom, and I cannot be /roi faineant/, with a steward for /maire
du palais/. A king does not go into the House of Commons."

Three years after this rise in the social ladder, Mrs. Travers was
seized with congestion of the lungs followed by pleurisy, and died
after less than a week's illness. Leopold never wholly recovered her
loss. Though still young and always handsome, the idea of another
wife, the love of another woman, were notions which he dismissed from
his, mind with a quiet scorn. He was too masculine a creature to
parade grief. For some weeks, indeed, he shut himself up in his own
room, so rigidly secluded that he would not see even his daughter.
But one morning he appeared in his fields as usual, and from that day
resumed his old habits, and gradually renewed that cordial interchange
of hospitalities which had popularly distinguished him since his
accession to wealth. Still people felt that the man was changed; he
was more taciturn, more grave: if always just in his dealings, he took
the harder side of justice, where in his wife's time he had taken the
gentler. Perhaps, to a man of strong will, the habitual intercourse
with an amiable woman is essential for those occasions in which Will
best proves the fineness of its temper by the facility with which it
can be bent.

It may be said that Leopold Travers might have found such intercourse
in the intimate companionship of his own daughter. But she was a mere
child when his wife died, and she grew up to womanhood too insensibly
for him to note the change. Besides, where a man has found a wife his
all-in-all, a daughter can never supply her place. The very reverence