The town-house was open to him.  Lord Romfrey was at Steynham.  Cecil could not suppose that he was falling into a pit in entering it.  He happened to be the favourite of the old housekeeper, who liked him for his haughtiness, which was to her thinking the sign of real English nobility, and perhaps it is the popular sign, and a tonic to the people.  She raised lamentations over the shame of the locking of the door against him that awful night, declaring she had almost mustered courage to go down to him herself, in spite of Mrs. Calling’s orders.  The old woman lowered her voice to tell him that her official superior had permitted the French gentleman and ladies to call her countess.  This she knew for a certainty, though she knew nothing of French; but the French lady who came second brought a maid who knew English a little, and she said the very words—­the countess, and said also that her party took Mrs. Culling for the Countess of Romfrey.  What was more, my lord’s coachman caught it up, and he called her countess, and he had a quarrel about it with the footman Kendall; and the day after a dreadful affair between them in the mews, home drives madam, and Kendall is to go up to her, and down the poor man comes, and not a word to be got out of him, but as if he had seen a ghost.  ‘She have such power,’ Cecil’s admirer concluded.

‘I wager I match her,’ Cecil said to himself, pulling at his wristbands and letting his lower teeth shine out.  The means of matching her were not so palpable as the resolution.  First he took men into his confidence.  Then he touched lightly on the story to ladies, with the question, ’What ought I to do?’ In consideration for the Earl of Romfrey he ought not to pass it over, he suggested.  The ladies of the family urged him to go to Steynham and boldly confront the woman.  He was not prepared for that.  Better, it seemed to him, to blow the rumour, and make it the topic of the season, until Lord Romfrey should hear of it.  Cecil had the ear of the town for a month.  He was in the act of slicing the air with his right hand in his accustomed style, one evening at Lady Elsea’s, to protest how vast was the dishonour done to the family by Mistress Culling, when Stukely Culbrett stopped him, saying, ’The lady you speak of is the Countess of Romfrey.  I was present at the marriage.’

Cecil received the shock in the attitude of those martial figures we see wielding two wooden swords in provincial gardens to tell the disposition of the wind:  abruptly abandoned by it, they stand transfixed, one sword aloft, the other at their heels.  The resemblance extended to his astonished countenance.  His big chest heaved.  Like many another wounded giant before him, he experienced the insufficiency of interjections to solace pain.  For them, however, the rocks were handy to fling, the trees to uproot; heaven’s concave resounded companionably to their bellowings.  Relief of so concrete a kind is not to be obtained in crowded London assemblies.