’If we can be sure that we ourselves are using reason rightly, Nevil!—­ not prejudice.’

’Of course.  But don’t you see, my Jenny, we have no interest in opposing reason?’

’But have we not all grown up together?  And is it just or wise to direct our efforts to overthrow a solid structure that is a part . . . ?’

He put his legal right in force to shut her mouth, telling her presently she might Lydiardize as much as she liked.  While practising this mastery, he assured her he would always listen to her:  yes, whether she Lydiardized, or what Dr. Shrapnel called Jenny-prated.

’That is to say, dear Nevil, that you have quite made up your mind to a toddling chattering little nursery wife?’

Very much the contrary to anything of the sort, he declared; and he proved his honesty by announcing an immediate reflection that had come to him:  ’How oddly things are settled!  Cecilia Halkett and Tuckham; you and I!  Now, I know for certain that I have brought Cecilia Halkett out of her woman’s Toryism, and given her at least liberal views, and she goes and marries an arrant Tory; while you, a bit of a Tory at heart, more than anything else, have married an ultra.’

’Perhaps we may hope that the conflict will be seasonable on both sides? —­if you give me fair play, Nevil!’

As fair play as a woman’s lord could give her, she was to have; with which, adieu to argumentation and controversy, and all the thanks in life to the parson!  On a lovely island, free from the seductions of care, possessing a wife who, instead of starting out of romance and poetry with him to the supreme honeymoon, led him back to those forsaken valleys of his youth, and taught him the joys of colour and sweet companionship, simple delights, a sister mind, with a loveliness of person and nature unimagined by him, Beauchamp drank of a happiness that neither Renee nor Cecilia had promised.  His wooing of Jenny Beauchamp was a flattery richer than any the maiden Jenny Denham could have deemed her due; and if his wonder in experiencing such strange gladness was quaintly ingenuous, it was delicious to her to see and know full surely that he who was at little pains to court, or please, independently of the agency of the truth in him, had come to be her lover through being her husband.

Here I would stop.  It is Beauchamp’s career that carries me on to its close, where the lanterns throw their beams off the mudbanks by the black riverside; when some few English men and women differed from the world in thinking that it had suffered a loss.

They sorrowed for the earl when tidings came to them of the loss of his child, alive one hour in his arms.  Rosamund caused them to be deceived as to her condition.  She survived; she wrote to Jenny, bidding her keep her husband cruising.  Lord Romfrey added a brief word:  he told Nevil that he would see no one for the present; hoped he would be absent a year, not a day less.  To render it the more easily practicable, in the next packet of letters Colonel Halkett and Cecilia begged them not to bring the Esperanza home for the yachting season:  the colonel said his daughter was to be married in April, and that bridegroom and bride had consented to take an old man off with them to Italy; perhaps in the autumn all might meet in Venice.