’I beg you not to mention the fact to my lord.  You see, you yourself can scarcely pardon it.  He does not exclude flesh from his table.  Blackburn Tuckham dined there once.  “You are a thorough revolutionist, Dr. Shrapnel,” he observed.  The doctor does not exclude wine, but he does not drink it.  Poor Tuckham went away entirely opposed to a Radical he could not even meet as a boon-fellow.  I begged him not to mention the circumstances, as I have begged you.  He pledged me his word to that effect solemnly; he correctly felt that if the truth were known, there would be further cause for the reprobation of the man who had been his host.’

‘And that poor girl, Nevil?’

’Miss Denham?  She contracted the habit of eating meat at school, and drinking wine in Paris, and continues it, occasionally.  Now run upstairs.  Insist on food.  Inform Madame de Rouaillout that her brother M. le comte de Croisnel will soon be here, and should not find her ill.  Talk to her as you women can talk.  Keep the blinds down in her room; light a dozen wax-candles.  Tell her I have no thought but of her.  It’s a lie:  of no woman but of her:  that you may say.  But that you can’t say.  You can say I am devoted—­ha, what stuff!  I’ve only to open my mouth!—­say nothing of me:  let her think the worst—­unless it comes to a question of her life:  then be a merciful good woman . . .’  He squeezed her fingers, communicating his muscular tremble to her sensitive woman’s frame, and electrically convincing her that he was a lover.

She went up-stairs.  In ten minutes she descended, and found him pacing up and down the hall.  ‘Madame de Rouaillout is much the same,’ she said.  He nodded, looked up the stairs, and about for his hat and gloves, drew on the gloves, fixed the buttons, blinked at his watch, and settled his hat as he was accustomed to wear it, all very methodically, and talking rapidly, but except for certain precise directions, which were not needed by so careful a housekeeper and nurse as Rosamund was known to be, she could not catch a word of meaning.  He had some appointment, it seemed; perhaps he was off for a doctor—­a fresh instance of his masculine incapacity to understand patient endurance.  After opening the housedoor, and returning to the foot of the stairs, listening and sighing, he disappeared.

It struck her that he was trying to be two men at once.

The litter of newspaper sheets in the morning-room brought his exclamation to her mind:  ‘They’re at me!’ Her eyes ran down the columns, and were seized by the print of his name in large type.  A leading article was devoted to Commander’s Beauchamp’s recent speech delivered in the great manufacturing town of Gunningham, at a meeting under the presidency of the mayor, and his replies to particular questions addressed to him; one being, what right did he conceive himself to have to wear the Sovereign’s uniform in professing Republican opinions?  Rosamund winced for her darling during her first perusal of