of an encounter of rams’ heads.  Let us be quit of Mr. Grancey Lespel’s lamentations.  The Whig gentleman had some reason to complain.  He had been trained to expect no other attack than that of his hereditary adversary-ram in front, and a sham ram—­no honest animal, but a ramming engine rather—­had attacked him in the rear.  Like Mr. Everard Romfrey and other Whigs, he was profoundly chagrined by popular ingratitude:  ‘not the same man,’ his wife said of him.  It nipped him early.  He took to proverbs; sure sign of the sere leaf in a man’s mind.

His wife reproached the people for their behaviour to him bitterly.  The lady regarded politics as a business that helped hunting-men a stage above sportsmen, for numbers of the politicians she was acquainted with were hunting-men, yet something more by virtue of the variety they could introduce into a conversation ordinarily treating of sport and the qualities of wines.  Her husband seemed to have lost in that Parliamentary seat the talisman which gave him notions distinguishing him from country squires; he had sunk, and he no longer cared for the months in London, nor for the speeches she read to him to re-awaken his mind and make him look out of himself, as he had done when he was a younger man and not a suspended Whig.  Her own favourite reading was of love-adventures written in the French tongue.  She had once been in love, and could be so sympathetic with that passion as to avow to Cecilia Halkett a tenderness for Nevil Beauchamp, on account of his relations with the Marquise de Rouaillout, and notwithstanding the demoniacal flame-halo of the Radical encircling him.

The allusion to Beauchamp occurred a few hours after Cecilia’s arrival at Itchincope.

Cecilia begged for the French lady’s name to be repeated; she had not heard it before, and she tasted the strange bitter relish of realization when it struck her ear to confirm a story that she believed indeed, but had not quite sensibly felt.

‘And it is not over yet, they say,’ Mrs. Grancey Lespel added, while softly flipping some spots of the colour proper to radicals in morals on the fame of the French lady.  She possessed fully the grave judicial spirit of her countrywomen, and could sit in judgement on the personages of tales which had entranced her, to condemn the heroines:  it was impolitic in her sex to pity females.  As for the men—­poor weak things!  As for Nevil Beauchamp, in particular, his case, this penetrating lady said, was clear:  he ought to be married.  ‘Could you make a sacrifice?’ she asked Cecilia playfully.

’Nevil Beauchamp and I are old friends, but we have agreed that we are deadly political enemies,’ Miss Halkett replied.

‘It is not so bad for a beginning,’ said Mrs. Lespel.

‘If one were disposed to martyrdom.’

The older woman nodded.  ‘Without that.’