It was a princely compliment.  She received it curtseying, and disarmed the intended irony.  In reply, she called him “Great Britain.”  I regret to say that he stood less proudly for his nation.  Indeed, he flushed.  He remembered articles girding at the policy of peace at any price, and half felt that Mrs. Lovell had meant to crown him with a Quaker’s hat.  His title fell speedily into disuse; but, “Yes, France,” and “No, France,” continued, his effort being to fix the epithet to frivolous allusions, from which her ingenuity rescued it honourably.

Had she ever been in love?  He asked her the question.  She stabbed him with so straightforward an affirmative that he could not conceal the wound.

“Have I not been married?” she said.

He began to experience the fretful craving to see the antecedents of the torturing woman spread out before him.  He conceived a passion for her girlhood.  He begged for portraits of her as a girl.  She showed him the portrait of Harry Lovell in a locket.  He held the locket between his fingers.  Dead Harry was kept very warm.  Could brains ever touch her emotions as bravery had done?

“Where are the brains I boast of?” he groaned, in the midst of these sensational extravagances.

The lull of action was soon to be disturbed.  A letter was brought to him.

He opened it and read—­

“Mr. Edward Blancove,—­When you rode by me under Fairly Park, I did not know you.  I can give you a medical certificate that since then I have been in the doctor’s hands.  I know you now.  I call upon you to meet me, with what weapons you like best, to prove that you are not a midnight assassin.  The place shall be where you choose to appoint.  If you decline I will make you publicly acknowledge what you have done.  If you answer, that I am not a gentleman and you are one, I say that you have attacked me in the dark, when I was on horseback, and you are now my equal, if I like to think so.  You will not talk about the law after that night.  The man you employed I may punish or I may leave, though he struck the blow.  But I will meet you.  To-morrow, a friend of mine, who is a major in the army, will be down here, and will call on you from me; or on any friend of yours you are pleased to name.  I will not let you escape.  Whether I shall face a guilty man in you, God knows; but I know I have a right to call upon you to face me.

“I am, Sir,
“Yours truly,

“Robert Eccles.”

Edward’s face grew signally white over the contents of this unprecedented challenge.  The letter had been brought in to him at the breakfast table.  “Read it, read it,” said Mrs. Lovell, seeing him put it by; and he had read it with her eyes on him.