‘And I, from my experience,’ came from Beauchamp.

His voice had a hollow sound, unlike his natural voice.

The earl looked at him remembering the bright laughing lad he had once been, and said:  ’Why not try a month of Madeira?  You have only to step on board the boat.’

‘I don’t want to lose a month of my friend,’ said Beauchamp.

‘Take your friend with you.  After these fevers our Winters are bad.’

‘I’ve been idle too long.’

‘But, Captain Beauchamp,’ said Jenny, ’you proposed to do nothing but read for a couple of years.’

‘Ay, there’s the voyage!’ sighed he, with a sailor-invalid’s vision of sunny seas dancing in the far sky.

’You must persuade Dr. Shrapnel to come; and he will not come unless you come too, and you won’t go anywhere but to the Alps!’ She bent her eyes on the floor.  Beauchamp remembered what had brought her home from the Alps.  He cast a cold look on his uncle talking with Cecilia:  granite, as he thought.  And the reflux of that slight feeling of despair seemed to tear down with it in wreckage every effort he had made in life, and cry failure on him.  Yet he was hoping that he had not been created for failure.

He touched his uncle’s hand indifferently:  ’My love to the countess:  let me hear of her, sir, if you please.’

‘You shall,’ said the earl.  ’But, off to Madeira, and up Teneriffe:  sail the Azores.  I’ll hire you a good-sized schooner.’

‘There is the Esperanza,’ said Cecilia.  ’And the vessel is lying idle, Nevil!  Can you allow it?’

He consented to laugh at himself, and fell to coughing.

Jenny Denham saw a real human expression of anxiety cross the features of the earl at the sound of the cough.

Lord Romfrey said ‘Adieu,’ to her.

He offered her his hand, which she contrived to avoid taking by dropping a formal half-reverence.

’Think of the Esperanza; she will be coasting her nominal native land! and adieu for to-day,’ Cecilia said to Beauchamp.

Jenny Denham and he stood at the window to watch the leave-taking in the garden, for a distraction.  They interchanged no remark of surprise at seeing the earl and Dr. Shrapnel hand-locked:  but Jenny’s heart reproached her uncle for being actually servile, and Beauchamp accused the earl of aristocratic impudence.

Both were overcome with remorse when Colonel Halkett, putting his head into the room to say good-bye to Beauchamp and place the Esperanza at his disposal for a Winter cruise, chanced to mention in two or three half words the purpose of the earl’s visit, and what had occurred.  He took it for known already.

To Miss Denham he remarked:  ’Lord Romfrey is very much concerned about your health; he fears you have overdone it in nursing Captain Beauchamp!

‘I must be off after him,’ said Beauchamp, and began trembling so that he could not stir.