was the only connection of the Romfreys with the parsonry, as Everard called them.  He attributed the boy’s feeling to the influence of his great-aunt Beauchamp, who would, he said, infallibly have made a parson of him.  ‘I’d rather enlist for a soldier,’ Nevil said, and he ceased to dream of rebellion, and of his little property of a few thousand pounds in the funds to aid him in it.  He confessed to his dear friend Rosamund Culling that he thought the parsons happy in having time to read history.  And oh, to feel for certain which side was the wrong side in our Civil War, so that one should not hesitate in choosing!  Such puzzles are never, he seemed to be aware, solved in a midshipman’s mess.  He hated bloodshed, and was guilty of the ‘cotton-spinners’ babble,’ abhorred of Everard, in alluding to it.  Rosamund liked him for his humanity; but she, too, feared he was a slack Romfrey when she heard him speak in precocious contempt of glory.  Somewhere, somehow, he had got hold of Manchester sarcasms concerning glory:  a weedy word of the newspapers had been sown in his bosom perhaps.  He said:  ’I don’t care to win glory; I know all about that; I ‘ve seen an old hat in the Louvre.’  And he would have had her to suppose that he had looked on the campaigning head-cover of Napoleon simply as a shocking bad, bald, brown-rubbed old tricorne rather than as the nod of extinction to thousands, the great orb of darkness, the still-trembling gloomy quiver—­the brain of the lightnings of battles.

Now this boy nursed no secret presumptuous belief that he was fitted for the walks of the higher intellect; he was not having his impudent boy’s fling at superiority over the superior, as here and there a subtle-minded vain juvenile will; nor was he a parrot repeating a line from some Lancastrian pamphlet.  He really disliked war and the sword; and scorning the prospect of an idle life, confessing that his abilities barely adapted him for a sailor’s, he was opposed to the career opened to him almost to the extreme of shrinking and terror.  Or that was the impression conveyed to a not unsympathetic hearer by his forlorn efforts to make himself understood, which were like the tappings of the stick of a blind man mystified by his sense of touch at wrong corners.  His bewilderment and speechlessness were a comic display, tragic to him.

Just as his uncle Everard predicted, he came home from his first voyage a pleasant sailor lad.  His features, more than handsome to a woman, so mobile they were, shone of sea and spirit, the chance lights of the sea, and the spirit breathing out of it.  As to war and bloodshed, a man’s first thought must be his country, young Jacket remarked, and ‘Ich dien’ was the best motto afloat.  Rosamund noticed the peculiarity of the books he selected for his private reading.  They were not boys’ books, books of adventure and the like.  His favourite author was one writing of Heroes, in (so she esteemed it) a style resembling either early architecture