In the morning there was a flying word from Roland, on his way to England.  Rosamund tempered her report of Renee by saying of her, that she was very quiet.  He turned to the window.

‘Look, what a climate ours is!’ Beauchamp abused the persistent fog.  ’Dull, cold, no sky, a horrible air to breathe!  This is what she has come to!  Has she spoken of me yet?’

‘No.’

‘Is she dead silent?’

‘She answers, if I speak to her.’

‘I believe, ma’am,’ said Beauchamp, ’that we are the coldest-hearted people in Europe.’

Rosamund did not defend us, or the fog.  Consequently nothing was left for him to abuse but himself.  In that she tried to moderate him, and drew forth a torrent of self-vituperation, after which he sank into the speechless misery he had been evading; until sophistical fancy, another evolution of his nature, persuaded him that Roland, seeing Renee, would for love’s sake be friendly to them.

‘I should have told you, Nevil, by the way, that the earl is dead,’ said Rosamund.

‘Her brother will be here to-day; he can’t be later than the evening,’ said Beauchamp.  ’Get her to eat, ma’am; you must.  Command her to eat.  This terrible starvation!’

‘You ate nothing yourself, Nevil, all day yesterday.’

He surveyed the table.  ’You have your cook in town, I see.  Here’s a breakfast to feed twenty hungry families in Spitalfields.  Where does the mass of meat go?  One excess feeds another.  You’re overdone with servants.  Gluttony, laziness, and pilfering come of your host of unmanageable footmen and maids; you stuff them, and wonder they’re idle and immoral.  If—­I suppose I must call him the earl now, or Colonel Halkett, or any one of the army of rich men, hear of an increase of the income-tax, or some poor wretch hints at a sliding scale of taxation, they yell as if they were thumb-screwed:  but five shillings in the pound goes to the kitchen as a matter of course—­to puff those pompous idiots! and the parsons, who should be preaching against this sheer waste of food and perversion of the strength of the nation, as a public sin, are maundering about schism.  There’s another idle army!  Then we have artists, authors, lawyers, doctors—­the honourable professions! all hanging upon wealth, all ageing the rich, and all bearing upon labour! it’s incubus on incubus.  In point of fact, the rider’s too heavy for the horse in England.’

He began to nibble at bread.

Rosamund pushed over to him a plate of the celebrated Steynham pie, of her own invention, such as no douse in the county of Sussex could produce or imitate.

‘What would you have the parsons do?’ she said.