“What do you think of that poet, Mellot?” said he once, on returning from a pic-nic, during which Elsley had never noticed his wife; and, at last, finding Valencia engaged with Headley, had actually gone off, pour pis aller, to watch Lord Scoutbush fishing.

“Oh, clever enough, and to spare; and as well read a man as I know.  One of the Sturm-und-drang party, of course:—­the express locomotive school, scream-and-go-head:  and thinks me, with my classicism, a benighted pagan.  Still, every man has a right to his opinion.  Live and let live.”

“I don’t care about his taste,” said the Major impatiently.  “What sort of man is he?—­man, Claude?”

“Ahem, humph!  ‘Irritabile genus poetarum.’  But one is so accustomed to that among literary men, one never expects them to be like anybody else, and so takes their whims and oddities for granted.”

“And their sins too, eh?”

“Sins?  I know of none on his part.”

“Don’t you call temper a sin?”

“No; I call it a determination of blood to the head, or of animal spirits to the wrong place, or—­my dear Major, I am no moralist.  I take people, you know, as I find them.  But he is a bore; and I should not wonder if that sweet little woman had found it out ere now.”

Campbell ground something between his teeth.  He fancied himself full of righteous wrath:  he was really in a very unchristian temper.  Be it so:  perhaps there were excuses for him (as there are for many men) of which we know nothing.

Elsley, meanwhile, watched Campbell with fast lowering brow.  Losing a woman’s affections?  He who does so deserves his fate.  Had he been in the habit of paying proper attention to Lucia, he would have liked Campbell all the more for his conduct.  There are few greater pleasures to a man who is what he should be to his wife, than to see other men admiring what he admires, and trying to rival him where he knows that he can have no rival.  Let them worship as much as they will.  Let her make herself as charming to them as she can.  What matter?  He smiles at them in his heart; for has he not, over and above all the pretty things which he can say and do ten times as well as they, a talisman—­a dozen talismans which are beyond their reach?—­in the strength of which he will go home and laugh over with her, amid sacred caresses, all which makes mean men mad?  But Elsley, alas for him, had neglected Lucia himself, and therefore dreaded comparison with any other man; and the suspicions which had taken root in him at Aberalva grew into ugly shape and strength.  However he was silent, and contented himself with coldness and all but rudeness.