‘She feels your influence.’

’She’s against the publication of the dawn—­for the present.  It’s an “unseasonable time.”  I argue with her:  I don’t get hold of her mind a bit; but at last she says, “very well.”  She has your head.’

And you have her heart, Lydiard could have rejoined.

They said good-bye, neither of them aware of the other’s task of endurance.

As they were parting, Beauchamp perceived his old comrade Jack Wilmore walking past.

‘Jack!’ he called.

Wilmore glanced round.  ‘How do you do, Beauchamp?’

‘Where are you off to, Jack?’

‘Down to the Admiralty.  I’m rather in a hurry; I have an appointment.’

‘Can’t you stop just a minute?’

‘I’m afraid I can’t.  Good morning.’

It was incredible; but this old friend, the simplest heart alive, retreated without a touch of his hand, and with a sorely wounded air.

‘That newspaper article appears to have been generally read,’ Beauchamp said to Lydiard, who answered: 

’The article did not put the idea of you into men’s minds, but gave tongue to it:  you may take it for an instance of the sagacity of the Press.’

’You wouldn’t take that man and me to have been messmates for years!  Old Jack Wilmore!  Don’t go, Lydiard.’

Lydiard declared that he was bound to go:  he was engaged to read Italian for an hour with Mrs. Wardour-Devereux.

‘Then go, by all means,’ Beauchamp dismissed him.

He felt as if he had held a review of his friends and enemies on the door-step, and found them of one colour.  If it was an accident befalling him in a London square during a space of a quarter of an hour, what of the sentiments of universal England?  Lady Barbara’s elopement with Lord Alfred last year did not rouse much execration; hardly worse than gossip and compassion.  Beauchamp drank a great deal of bitterness from his reflections.

They who provoke huge battles, and gain but lame victories over themselves, insensibly harden to the habit of distilling sour thoughts from their mischances and from most occurrences.  So does the world they combat win on them.

‘For,’ says Dr. Shrapnel, ’the world and nature, which are opposed in relation to our vital interests, each agrees to demand of us a perfect victory, on pain otherwise of proving it a stage performance; and the victory over the world, as over nature, is over self:  and this victory lies in yielding perpetual service to the world, and none to nature:  for the world has to be wrought out, nature to be subdued.’

The interior of the house was like a change of elements to Beauchamp.  He had never before said to himself, ‘I have done my best, and I am beaten!’ Outside of it, his native pugnacity had been stimulated; but here, within the walls where Renee lay silently breathing, barely breathing, it might be dying, he was overcome, and left it to circumstance to carry him to a conclusion.  He went up-stairs to the drawing-room, where he beheld Madame d’Auffray in conversation with Rosamund.