Nevertheless he was hardly grieved in missing Renee at Rosamund’s breakfast-table.  Rosamund informed him that Madame de Rouaillout’s door was locked.  Her particular news for him was of a disgraceful alarum raised by Captain Baskelett in the night, to obtain admission; and of an interview she had with him in the early morning, when he subjected her to great insolence.  Beauchamp’s attention was drawn to her repetition of the phrase ‘mistress of the house.’  However, she did him justice in regard to Renee, and thoroughly entered into the fiction of Renee’s visit to her as her guest:  he passed over everything else.

To stop the mouth of a scandal-monger, he drove full speed to Cecil’s Club, where he heard that the captain had breakfasted and had just departed for Romfrey Castle.  He followed to the station.  The train had started.  So mischief was rolling in that direction.

Late at night Rosamund was allowed to enter the chill unlighted chamber, where the unhappy lady had been lying for hours in the gloom of a London Winter’s daylight and gaslight.

‘Madame de Rouaillout is indisposed with headache,’ was her report to Beauchamp.

The conventional phraseology appeased him, though he saw his grief behind it.

Presently he asked if Renee had taken food.

‘No:  you know what a headache is,’ Rosamund replied.

It is true that we do not care to eat when we are in pain.

He asked if she looked ill.

‘She will not have lights in the room,’ said Rosamund.

Piecemeal he gained the picture of Renee in an image of the death within which welcomed a death without.

Rosamund was impatient with him for speaking of medical aid.  These men!  She remarked very honestly: 

‘Oh, no; doctors are not needed.’

‘Has she mentioned me?’

‘Not once.’

‘Why do you swing your watch-chain, ma’am?’ cried Beauchamp, bounding off his chair.

He reproached her with either pretending to indifference or feeling it; and then insisted on his privilege of going up-stairs-accompanied by her, of course; and then it was to be only to the door; then an answer to a message was to satisfy him.

‘Any message would trouble her:  what message would you send?’ Rosamund asked him.

The weighty and the trivial contended; no fitting message could be thought of.

’You are unused to real suffering—­that is for women!—­and want to be doing instead of enduring,’ said Rosamund.

She was beginning to put faith in the innocence of these two mortally sick lovers.  Beauchamp’s outcries against himself gave her the shadows of their story.  He stood in tears—­a thing to see to believe of Nevil Beauchamp; and plainly he did not know it, or else he would have taken her advice to him to leave the house at an hour that was long past midnight.  Her method for inducing him to go was based on her intimate knowledge of him:  she made as if to soothe and kiss him compassionately.