‘Well, my dear child, it has all been very wonderful and uncomfortable?’ said the count.

‘Wonderful, papa; splendid.’

‘No qualms of any kind?’

‘None, I assure you.’  And madame?’

‘Madame will confirm it, if you find a seat for her.’

Rosamund Culling was received in the count’s gondola, cordially thanked, and placed beside the marquis.

‘I stay on board and pay these fellows,’ said Roland.

Renee was told by her father to follow madame.  He had jumped into the spare gondola and offered a seat to Beauchamp.

‘No,’ cried Renee, arresting Beauchamp, ’it is I who mean to sit with papa.’

Up sprang the marquis with an entreating, ‘Mademoiselle!’

‘M.  Beauchamp will entertain you, M. le Marquis.’

‘I want him here,’ said the count; and Beauchamp showed that his wish was to enter the count’s gondola, but Renee had recovered her aplomb, and decisively said ‘No,’ and Beauchamp had to yield.

That would have been an opportunity of speaking to her father without a formal asking of leave.  She knew it as well as Nevil Beauchamp.

Renee took his hand to be assisted in the step down to her father’s arms, murmuring: 

‘Do nothing—­nothing! until you hear from me.’

CHAPTER XI

CAPTAIN BASKELETT

Our England, meanwhile, was bustling over the extinguished war, counting the cost of it, with a rather rueful eye on Manchester, and soothing the taxed by an exhibition of heroes at brilliant feasts.  Of course, the first to come home had the cream of the praises.  She hugged them in a manner somewhat suffocating to modest men, but heroism must be brought to bear upon these excesses of maternal admiration; modesty, too, when it accepts the place of honour at a public banquet, should not protest overmuch.  To be just, the earliest arrivals, which were such as reached the shores of Albion before her war was at an end, did cordially reciprocate the hug.  They were taught, and they believed most naturally, that it was quite as well to repose upon her bosom as to have stuck to their posts.  Surely there was a conscious weakness in the Spartans, who were always at pains to discipline their men in heroical conduct, and rewarded none save the stand-fasts.  A system of that sort seems to betray the sense of poverty in the article.  Our England does nothing like it.  All are welcome home to her so long as she is in want of them.  Besides, she has to please the taxpayer.  You may track a shadowy line or crazy zigzag of policy in almost every stroke of her domestic history:  either it is the forethought finding it necessary to stir up an impulse, or else dashing impulse gives a lively pull to the afterthought:  policy becomes evident somehow, clumsily very possibly.  How can she manage an enormous middle-class, to keep it happy, other than a little clumsily?  The managing of