‘Not any,’ said Miss Denham.

The voice was abroad for proof of that.

He stood with a swelling heart.

Jenny flung out a rug to its length beside the sofa, and; holding it by one end, said:  ‘I must have my rest, to be of service, my lord.’

He bowed.  He was mute and surprised.

The young lady was like no person of her age and sex that he remembered ever to have met.

‘I will close the door,’ he said, retiring softly.

‘Do not, my lord.’

The rug was over her, up to her throat, and her eyes were shut.  He looked back through the doorway in going out.  She was asleep.

‘Some delirium.  Gannet of good hope.  All in the usual course’; he transmitted intelligence to his wife.

A strong desire for wine at his dinner-table warned him of something wrong with his iron nerves.

CHAPTER LI

IN THE NIGHT

The delirious voice haunted him.  It came no longer accompanied by images and likenesses to this and that of animate nature, which were relieving and distracting; it came to him in its mortal nakedness—­an afflicting incessant ringing peal, bare as death’s ribs in telling of death.  When would it stop?  And when it stopped, what would succeed?  What ghastly silence!

He walked to within view of the lights of Dr. Shrapnel’s at night:  then home to his hotel.

Miss Denham’s power of commanding sleep, as he could not, though contrary to custom he tried it on the right side and the left, set him thinking of her.  He owned she was pretty.  But that, he contended, was not the word; and the word was undiscoverable.  Not Cecilia Halkett herself had so high-bred an air, for Cecilia had not her fineness of feature and full quick eyes, of which the thin eyelids were part of the expression.  And Cecilia sobbed, snifed, was patched about the face, reddish, bluish.  This girl was pliable only to service, not to grief:  she did her work for three-and-twenty hours, and fell to her sleep of one hour like a soldier.  Lord Romfrey could not recollect anything in a young woman that had taken him so much as the girl’s tossing out of the rug and covering herself, lying down and going to sleep under his nose, absolutely independent of his presence.

She had not betrayed any woman’s petulance with him for his conduct to her uncle or guardian.  Nor had she hypocritically affected the reverse, as ductile women do, when they feel wanting in force to do the other.  She was not unlike Nevil’s marquise in face, he thought:  less foreign of course; looking thrice as firm.  Both were delicately featured.

He had a dream.

It was of an interminable procession of that odd lot called the People.  All of them were quarrelling under a deluge.  One party was for umbrellas, one was against them:  and sounding the dispute with a question or two, Everard held it logical that there should be protection from the wet:  just as logical on the other hand that so frail a shelter should be discarded, considering the tremendous downpour.  But as he himself was dry, save for two or three drops, he deemed them all lunatics.  He requested them to gag their empty chatter-boxes, and put the mother upon that child’s cry.