Mr. Pollington and certain City gentlemen hearing the poor General’s renewed soliloquies, were seized with disgust of Lady Camper’s conduct, and stoutly advised an application to the Law Courts.

He gave ear to them abstractedly, but after pulling out the whole chapter of the caricatures (which it seemed that he kept in a case of morocco leather in his breast-pocket), showing them, with comments on them, and observing, ’There will be more, there must be more, I say I am sure there are things I do that her ladyship will discover and expose,’ he declined to seek redress or simple protection; and the miserable spectacle was exhibited soon after of this courtly man listening to Mrs. Barcop on the weather, and replying in acquiescence:  ’It is hot.—­If your ladyship will only abstain from colours.  Very hot as you say, madam,—­I do not complain of pen and ink, but I would rather escape colours.  And I dare say you find it hot too?’

Mrs. Barcop shut her eyes and sighed over the wreck of a handsome military officer.

She asked him:  ‘What is your objection to colours?’

His hand was at his breast-pocket immediately, as he said:  ’Have you not seen?’—­though but a few minutes back he had shown her the contents of the packet, including a hurried glance of the famous digging scene.

By this time the entire district was in fervid sympathy with General Ople.  The ladies did not, as their lords did, proclaim astonishment that a man should suffer a woman to goad him to a state of semi-lunacy; but one or two confessed to their husbands, that it required a great admiration of General Ople not to despise him, both for his susceptibility and his patience.  As for the men, they knew him to have faced the balls in bellowing battle-strife; they knew him to have endured privation, not only cold but downright want of food and drink—­an almost unimaginable horror to these brave daily feasters; so they could not quite look on him in contempt; but his want of sense was offensive, and still more so his submission to a scourging by a woman.  Not one of them would have deigned to feel it.  Would they have allowed her to see that she could sting them?  They would have laughed at her.  Or they would have dragged her before a magistrate.

It was a Sunday in early Summer when General Ople walked to morning service, unaccompanied by Elizabeth, who was unwell.  The church was of the considerate old-fashioned order, with deaf square pews, permitting the mind to abstract itself from the sermon, or wrestle at leisure with the difficulties presented by the preacher, as General Ople often did, feeling not a little in love with his sincere attentiveness for grappling with the knotty point and partially allowing the struggle to be seen.

The Church was, besides, a sanctuary for him.  Hither his enemy did not come.  He had this one place of refuge, and he almost looked a happy man again.

He had passed into his hat and out of it, which he habitually did standing, when who should walk up to within a couple of yards of him but Lady Camper.  Her pew was full of poor people, who made signs of retiring.  She signified to them that they were to sit, then quietly took her seat among them, fronting the General across the aisle.