Everard’s pointed interrogations reduced her to speak defensively, instead of attacking and claiming his aid for the poor enamoured young man.  She dared not say that Nevil continued to be absent because he was now encouraged by the girl to remain in attendance on her, and was more than half inspired to hope, and too artfully assisted to deceive the count and the marquis under the guise of simple friendship.  Letters passed between them in books given into one another’s hands with an audacious openness of the saddest augury for the future of the pair, and Nevil could be so lost to reason as to glory in Renee’s intrepidity, which he justified by their mutual situation, and cherished for a proof that she was getting courage.  In fine, Rosamund abandoned her task of pleading.  Nevil’s communications gave the case a worse and worse aspect:  Renee was prepared to speak to her father; she delayed it; then the two were to part; they were unable to perform the terrible sacrifice and slay their last hope; and then Nevil wrote of destiny—­language hitherto unknown to him, evidently the tongue of Renee.  He slipped on from Italy to France.  His uncle was besieged by a series of letters, and his cousin, Cecil Baskelett, a captain in England’s grand reserve force—­her Horse Guards, of the Blue division—­helped Everard Romfrey to laugh over them.

It was not difficult, alack!  Letters of a lover in an extremity of love, crying for help, are as curious to cool strong men as the contortions of the proved heterodox tied to a stake must have been to their chastening ecclesiastical judges.  Why go to the fire when a recantation will save you from it?  Why not break the excruciating faggot-bands, and escape, when you have only to decide to do it?  We naturally ask why.  Those martyrs of love or religion are madmen.  Altogether, Nevil’s adjurations and supplications, his threats of wrath and appeals to reason, were an odd mixture.  ‘He won’t lose a chance while there’s breath in his body,’ Everard said, quite good-humouredly, though he deplored that the chance for the fellow to make his hero-parade in society, and haply catch an heiress, was waning.  There was an heiress at Steynham, on her way with her father to Italy, very anxious to see her old friend Nevil—­Cecilia Halkett—­and very inquisitive this young lady of sixteen was to know the cause of his absence.  She heard of it from Cecil.

’And one morning last week mademoiselle was running away with him, and the next morning she was married to her marquis!’

Cecil was able to tell her that.

‘I used to be so fond of him,’ said the ingenuous young lady.  She had to thank Nevil for a Circassian dress and pearls, which he had sent to her by the hands of Mrs. Culling—­a pretty present to a girl in the nursery, she thought, and in fact she chose to be a little wounded by the cause of his absence.

‘He’s a good creature-really,’ Cecil spoke on his cousin’s behalf.  ’Mad; he always will be mad.  A dear old savage; always amuses me.  He does!  I get half my entertainment from him.’