"It ought to be."

Alas and alas! that "ought to be;" what depths of sorrowful meaning
lie within that simple phrase! How happy would be our lives, how
grand our actions, how pure our souls, if all could be with us as it
ought to be!



CHAPTER VIII.

WE often form cordial intimacies in the confined society of a country
house, or a quiet watering-place, or a small Continental town, which
fade away into remote acquaintanceship in the mighty vortex of London
life, neither party being to blame for the estrangement. It was so
with Leopold Travers and Kenelm Chillingly. Travers, as we have seen,
had felt a powerful charm in the converse of the young stranger, so in
contrast with the routine of the rural companionships to which his
alert intellect had for many years circumscribed its range. But on
reappearing in London the season before Kenelm again met him, he had
renewed old friendships with men of his own standing,--officers in the
regiment of which he had once been a popular ornament, some of them
still unmarried, a few of them like himself widowed, others who had
been his rivals in fashion, and were still pleasant idlers about town;
and it rarely happens in a metropolis that we have intimate
friendships with those of another generation, unless there be some
common tie in the cultivation of art and letters, or the action of
kindred sympathies in the party strife of politics. Therefore Travers
and Kenelm had had little familiar communication with each other since
they first met at the Beaumanoirs'. Now and then they found