’Lydiard tells me he has a very sound idea of the value of money, and has actually made money by cattle breeding; but he has flung ten thousand pounds on a single building outside the town, and he’ll have to endow it to support it—­a Club to educate Radicals.  The fact is, he wants to jam the business of two or three centuries into a life-time.  These men of their so-called progress are like the majority of religious minds:  they can’t believe without seeing and touching.  That is to say, they don’t believe in the abstract at all, but they go to work blindly by agitating, and proselytizing, and persecuting to get together a mass they can believe in.  You see it in their way of arguing; it’s half done with the fist.  Lydiard tells me he left him last in a horrible despondency about progress.  Ha! ha!  Beauchamp’s no Radical.  He hasn’t forgiven the Countess of Romfrey for marrying above her rank.  He may be a bit of a Republican:  but really in this country Republicans are fighting with the shadow of an old hat and a cockhorse.  I beg to state that I have a reverence for constituted authority:  I speak of what those fellows are contending with.’

‘Right,’ said Colonel Halkett.  ’But “the shadow of an old hat and a cockhorse”:  what does that mean?’

‘That’s what our Republicans are hitting at, sir.’

‘Ah! so; yes,’ quoth the colonel.  ’And I say this to Nevil Beauchamp, that what we’ve grown up well with, powerfully with, it’s base ingratitude and dangerous folly to throw over.’

He blamed Beauchamp for ingratitude to the countess, who had, he affirmed of his own knowledge, married Lord Romfrey to protect Beauchamp’s interests.

A curious comment on this allegation was furnished by the announcement of the earl’s expectations of a son and heir.  The earl wrote to Colonel Halkett from Romfrey Castle inviting him to come and spend some time there.

‘Now, that’s brave news!’ the colonel exclaimed.

He proposed a cruise round by the Cornish coast to the Severn, and so to Romfrey Castle, to squeeze the old lord’s hand and congratulate him with all his heart.  Cecilia was glad to acquiesce, for an expedition of any description was a lull in the storm that hummed about her ears in the peace of home, where her father would perpetually speak of the day to be fixed.  Sailing the sea on a cruise was like the gazing at wonderful colours of a Western sky:  an oblivion of earthly dates and obligations.  What mattered it that there were gales in August?  She loved the sea, and the stinging salt spray, and circling gull and plunging gannet, the sun on the waves, and the torn cloud.  The revelling libertine open sea wedded her to Beauchamp in that veiled cold spiritual manner she could muse on as a circumstance out of her life.