She spoke to Stukely Culbrett, her dead husband’s friend, to whose recommendation she was indebted for her place in Everard Romfrey’s household.

‘Nevil behaved like a knight, I hear.’

‘Your beauty was disputed,’ said he, ’and Nevil knocked the blind man down for not being able to see.’

She thought, ’Not my beauty!  Nevil struck his cousin on behalf of the only fair thing I have left to me!’

This was a moment with her when many sensations rush together and form a knot in sensitive natures.  She had been very good-looking.  She was good-looking still, but she remembered the bloom of her looks in her husband’s days (the tragedy of the mirror is one for a woman to write:  I am ashamed to find myself smiling while the poor lady weeps), she remembered his praises, her pride; his death in battle, her anguish:  then, on her strange entry to this house, her bitter wish to be older; and then, the oppressive calm of her recognition of her wish’s fulfilment, the heavy drop to dead earth, when she could say, or pretend to think she could say—­I look old enough:  will they tattle of me now?  Nevil’s championship of her good name brought her history spinning about her head, and threw a finger of light on her real position.  In that she saw the slenderness of her hold on respect, as well as felt her personal stainlessness.  The boy warmed her chill widowhood.  It was written that her, second love should be of the pattern of mother’s love.  She loved him hungrily and jealously, always in fear for him when he was absent, even anxiously when she had him near.  For some cause, born, one may fancy, of the hour of her love’s conception, his image in her heart was steeped in tears.  She was not, happily, one of the women who betray strong feeling, and humour preserved her from excesses of sentiment.

CHAPTER III

CONTAINS BARONIAL VIEWS OF THE PRESENT TIME

Upon the word of honour of Rosamund, the letter to the officers of the French Guard was posted.

‘Post it, post it,’ Everard said, on her consulting him, with the letter in her hand.  ‘Let the fellow stand his luck.’  It was addressed to the Colonel of the First Regiment of the Imperial Guard, Paris.  That superscription had been suggested by Colonel Halkett.  Rosamund was in favour of addressing it to Versailles, Nevil to the Tuileries; but Paris could hardly fail to hit the mark, and Nevil waited for the reply, half expecting an appointment on the French sands:  for the act of posting a letter, though it be to little short of the Pleiades even, will stamp an incredible proceeding as a matter of business, so ready is the ardent mind to take footing on the last thing done.  The flight of Mr. Beauchamp’s letter placed it in the common order of occurrences for the youthful author of it.  Jack Wilmore, a messmate, offered to second him, though he should be dismissed the service for it.  Another