They lost him once in Cadiz, and discovered him on the quay, looking about for a vessel.  In getting him to return to the Esperanza, they nearly all three fell into the hands of the police.  Beauchamp gave him a great deal of his time, reading and discussing with him on deck and in the cabin, and projecting future enterprises, to pacify his restlessness.  A translation of Plato had become Beauchamp’s intellectual world.  This philosopher singularly anticipated his ideas.  Concerning himself he was beginning to think that he had many years ahead of him for work.  He was with Dr. Shrapnel, as to the battle, and with Jenny as to the delay in recommencing it.  Both the men laughed at the constant employment she gave them among the Greek islands in furnishing her severely accurate accounts of sea-fights and land-fights:  and the scenes being before them they could neither of them protest that their task-work was an idle labour.  Dr. Shrapnel assisted in fighting Marathon and Salamis over again cordially—­to shield Great Britain from the rule of a satrapy.

Beauchamp often tried to conjure words to paint his wife.  On grave subjects she had the manner of speaking of a shy scholar, and between grave and playful, between smiling and serious, her clear head, her nobly poised character, seemed to him to have never had a prototype and to elude the art of picturing it in expression, until he heard Lydiard call her whimsically, ‘Portia disrobing’

Portia half in her doctor’s gown, half out of it.  They met Lydiard and his wife Louise, and Mr. and Mrs. Tuckham, in Venice, where, upon the first day of October, Jenny Beauchamp gave birth to a son.  The thrilling mother did not perceive on this occasion the gloom she cast over the father of the child and Dr. Shrapnel.  The youngster would insist on his right to be sprinkled by the parson, to get a legal name and please his mother.  At all turns in the history of our healthy relations with women we are confronted by the parson!  ‘And, upon my word, I believe,’ Beauchamp said to Lydiard, ’those parsons—­not bad creatures in private life:  there was one in Madeira I took a personal liking to—­but they’re utterly ignorant of what men feel to them—­more ignorant than women!’ Mr. Tuckham and Mrs. Lydiard would not listen to his foolish objections; nor were they ever mentioned to Jenny.  Apparently the commission of the act of marriage was to force Beauchamp from all his positions one by one.

‘The education of that child?’ Mrs. Lydiard said to her husband.

He considered that the mother would prevail.

Cecilia feared she would not.

‘Depend upon it, he’ll make himself miserable if he can,’ said Tuckham.