And Captain Baskelett! thought Rosamund; her jealousy whispering that the mention of his name close upon Cecilia Halkett’s might have a nuptial signification.

She was a witness from her window—­a prisoner’s window, her ’eager heart could have termed it—­of a remarkable ostentation of cordiality between the colonel and Cecil, in the presence of Mr. Romfrey.  Was it his humour to conspire to hand Miss Halkett to Cecil, and then to show Nevil the prize he had forfeited by his folly?  The three were on the lawn a little before Colonel Halkett’s departure.  The colonel’s arm was linked with Cecil’s while they conversed.  Presently the latter received his afternoon’s letters, and a newspaper.  He soon had the paper out at a square stretch, and sprightly information for the other two was visible in his crowing throat.  Mr. Romfrey raised the gun from his shoulder-pad, and grounded it.  Colonel Halkett wished to peruse the matter with his own eyes, but Cecil could not permit it; he must read it aloud for them, and he suited his action to his sentences.  Had Rosamund been accustomed to leading articles which are the composition of men of an imposing vocabulary, she would have recognized and as good as read one in Cecil’s gestures as he tilted his lofty stature forward and back, marking his commas and semicolons with flapping of his elbows, and all but doubling his body at his periods.  Mr. Romfrey had enough of it half-way down the column; his head went sharply to left and right.  Cecil’s peculiar foppish slicing down of his hand pictured him protesting that there was more and finer of the inimitable stuff to follow.  The end of the scene exhibited the paper on the turf, and Colonel Halkett’s hand on Cecil’s shoulder, Mr. Romfrey nodding some sort of acquiescence over the muzzle of his gun, whether reflective or positive Rosamund could not decide.  She sent out a footman for the paper, and was presently communing with its eloquent large type, quite unable to perceive where the comicality or the impropriety of it lay, for it would have struck her that never were truer things of Nevil Beauchamp better said in the tone befitting them.  This perhaps was because she never heard fervid praises of him, or of anybody, delivered from the mouth, and it is not common to hear Englishmen phrasing great eulogies of one another.  Still, as a rule, they do not object to have it performed in that region of our national eloquence, the Press, by an Irishman or a Scotchman.  And what could there be to warrant Captain Baskelett’s malicious derision, and Mr. Romfrey’s nodding assent to it, in an article where all was truth?