he had gained an acquaintance with the struggles of the neighbouring agricultural poor to live and rear their children.  His uncle’s table roared at his enumeration of the sickly little beings, consumptive or bandy-legged, within a radius of five miles of Steynham.  Action was what he wanted, Everard said.  Nevil perhaps thought the same, for he dashed out of his mooning with a wave of the Tory standard, delighting the ladies, though in that conflict of the Lion and the Unicorn (which was a Tory song) he seemed rather to wish to goad the dear lion than crush the one-horned intrusive upstart.  His calling on the crack corps of Peers to enrol themselves forthwith in the front ranks, and to anticipate opposition by initiating measures, and so cut out that funny old crazy old galleon, the People, from under the batteries of the enemy, highly amused the gentlemen.

Before rejoining his ship, Nevil paid his customary short visit of ceremony to his great-aunt Beauchamp—­a venerable lady past eighty, hitherto divided from him in sympathy by her dislike of his uncle Everard, who had once been his living hero.  That was when he was in frocks, and still the tenacious fellow could not bear to hear his uncle spoken ill of.

’All the men of that family are heartless, and he is a man of wood, my dear, and a bad man,’ the old lady said.  ’He should have kept you at school, and sent you to college.  You want reading and teaching and talking to.  Such a house as that is should never be a home for you.’  She hinted at Rosamund.  Nevil defended the persecuted woman, but with no better success than from the attacks of the Romfrey ladies; with this difference, however, that these decried the woman’s vicious arts, and Mistress Elizabeth Mary Beauchamp put all the sin upon the man.  Such a man! she said.  ’Let me hear that he has married her, I will not utter another word.’  Nevil echoed, ‘Married!’ in a different key.

’I am as much of an aristocrat as any of you, only I rank morality higher,’ said Mrs. Beauchamp.  ’When you were a child I offered to take you and make you my heir, and I would have educated you.  You shall see a great-nephew of mine that I did educate; he is eating his dinners for the bar in London, and comes to me every Sunday.  I shall marry him to a good girl, and I shall show your uncle what my kind of man-making is.’

Nevil had no desire to meet the other great-nephew, especially when he was aware of the extraordinary circumstance that a Beauchamp great-niece, having no money, had bestowed her hand on a Manchester man defunct, whereof this young Blackburn Tuckham, the lawyer, was issue.  He took his leave of Mrs. Elizabeth Beauchamp, respecting her for her constitutional health and brightness, and regretting for the sake of the country that she had not married to give England men and women resembling her.  On the whole he considered her wiser in her prescription for the malady besetting him than his uncle.  He knew that action was but a temporary remedy.  College would have been his chronic medicine, and the old lady’s acuteness in seeing it impressed him forcibly.  She had given him a peaceable two days on the Upper Thames, in an atmosphere of plain good sense and just-mindedness.  He wrote to thank her, saying: