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180 whether I shall pass another winter here. Indeed, one can never say where one will be."

"No, one can't; such as you, at least, can not. I am not of a migratory tribe myself."

"I wish you were."

"I'm not a bit obliged to you. Your nomade life does not agree with young ladies."

"I think they are taking to it pretty freely, then. We have unprotected young women all about the world."

"And great bores you find them, I suppose?"

"No; I like it. The more we can get out of old-fashioned grooves, the better I am pleased. I should be a Radical to-morrow—a regular man of the people—only I should break my mother's heart."

"Whatever you do, Lord Lufton, do not do that."

"That is why I have liked you so much," he continued, "because you get out of the grooves."

"Do I?"

"Yes; and go along by yourself, guiding your own footsteps; not carried hither and thither, just as your grandmother's old tramway may chance to take you."

"Do you know I have a strong idea that my grandmother's old tramway will be the safest and the best, after all? I have not left it very far, and I certainly mean to go back to it."

"That's impossible! An army of old women, with coils of ropes made out of time-honored prejudices, could not drag you back."

"No, Lord Lufton, that is true. But one—" and then she stopped herself. She could not tell him that one loving mother, anxious for her only son, had sufficed to do it. She could not explain to him that this departure from the established tramway had already broken her own rest, and turned her peaceful, happy life into a grievous battle.

"I know that you are trying to go back," he said. "Do you think that I have eyes and can not see? Come, Lucy, you and I have been friends, and we must not part in this way. My mother is a paragon among women. I say it in earnest—a paragon among women; and her love for me is the perfection of motherly love."

"It is, it is; and I am so glad that you acknowledge it."

"I should be worse than a brute did I not do so; but,