She was listening to the voices of Mr. Romfrey and Beauchamp in a fever.  Ordinarily the lord of Steynham was not out of his bed later than twelve o’clock at night.  His door opened at half-past one.  Not a syllable was exchanged by the couple in the hall.  They had fought it out.  Mr. Romfrey came upstairs alone, and on the closing of his chamber-door she slipped down to Beauchamp and had a dreadful hour with him that subdued her disposition to sit in judgement upon men.  The unavailing attempt to move his uncle had wrought him to the state in which passionate thoughts pass into speech like heat to flame.  Rosamund strained her mental sight to gain a conception of his prodigious horror of the treatment of Dr. Shrapnel that she might think him sane:  and to retain a vestige of comfort in her bosom she tried to moderate and make light of as much as she could conceive.  Between the two efforts she had no sense but that of helplessness.  Once more she was reduced to promise that she would speak the whole truth to Mr. Romfrey, even to the fact that she had experienced a common woman’s jealousy of Dr. Shrapnel’s influence, and had alluded to him jealously, spitefully, and falsely.  There was no mercy in Beauchamp.  He was for action at any cost, with all the forces he could gather, and without delays.  He talked of Cecilia as his uncle’s bride to him.  Rosamund could hardly trust her ears when he informed her he had told his uncle of his determination to compel him to accomplish the act of penitence.  ‘Was it prudent to say it, Nevil?’ she asked.  But, as in his politics, he disdained prudence.  A monstrous crime had been committed, involving the honour of the family.  No subtlety of insinuation, no suggestion, could wean him from the fixed idea that the apology to Dr. Shrapnel must be spoken by his uncle in person.

‘If one could only imagine Mr. Romfrey doing it!’ Rosamund groaned.

‘He shall:  and you will help him,’ said Beauchamp.

‘If you loved a woman half as much as you do that man!’

‘If I knew a woman as good, as wise, as noble as he!’

‘You are losing her.’

’You expect me to go through ceremonies of courtship at a time like this!  If she cares for me she will feel with me.  Simple compassion—­but let Miss Halkett be.  I’m afraid I overtasked her in taking her to Bevisham.  She remained outside the garden.  Ma’am, she is unsullied by contact with a single shrub of Dr. Shrapnel’s territory.’

’Do not be so bitterly ironical, Nevil.  You have not seen her as I have.’

Rosamund essayed a tender sketch of the fair young lady, and fancied that she drew forth a sigh; she would have coloured the sketch, but he commanded her to hurry off to bed, and think of her morning’s work.

A commission of which we feel we can accurately forecast the unsuccessful end is not likely to be undertaken with an ardour that might perhaps astound the presageing mind with unexpected issues.  Rosamund fulfilled hers in the style of one who has learnt a lesson, and, exactly as she had anticipated, Mr. Romfrey accused her of coming to him from a conversation with that fellow Nevil overnight.  He shrugged and left the house for his morning’s walk across the fields.