Kenelm started, turned very pale, threw aside the cigar, rose, and
walked the room to and fro with very quick but very irregular strides.

Tom continued quietly. "Suppose I had won Jessie and married her, I
don't think any idea of improving myself would have entered my head.
My uncle would have been very much offended at my marrying a
day-labourer's daughter, and would not have invited me to Luscombe. I
should have remained at Graveleigh, with no ambition of being more
than a common farrier, an ignorant, noisy, quarrelsome man; and if I
could not have made Jessie as fond of me as I wished, I should not
have broken myself of drinking, and I shudder to think what a brute I
might have been, when I see in the newspapers an account of some
drunken wife-beater. How do we know but what that wife-beater loved
his wife dearly before marriage, and she did not care for him? His
home was unhappy, and so he took to drink and to wife-beating."

"I was right, then," said Kenelm, halting his strides, when I told you
it would be a miserable fate to be married to a girl whom you loved to
distraction, and whose heart you could never warm to you, whose life
you could never render happy."

"So right!"

"Let us drop that part of the subject at present," said Kenelm,
reseating himself, "and talk about your wish to travel. Though
contented that you did not marry Jessie, though you can now, without
anguish, greet her as the wife of another, still there are some
lingering thoughts of her that make you restless; and you feel that
you could more easily wrench yourself from these thoughts in a marked
change of scene and adventure, that you might bury them altogether in