‘Damned fine speech,’ remarked Everard.  ’Now you get out of that trick of prize-orationing.  I call it snuffery, sir; it’s all to your own nose!  You’re talking to me, not to a gallery.  “Worthy of them!” Caesar wraps his head in his robe:  he gets his dig in the ribs for all his attitudinizing.  It’s very well for a man to talk like that who owns no more than his barebodkin life, poor devil.  Tall talk’s his jewelry:  he must have his dandification in bunkum.  You ought to know better.  Property and titles are worth having, whether you are “worthy of them” or a disgrace to your class.  The best way of defending them is to keep a strong fist, and take care you don’t draw your fore-foot back more than enough.’

‘Please propose something to be done,’ said Nevil, depressed by the recommendation of that attitude.

Everard proposed a fight for every privilege his class possessed.  ’They say,’ he said, ’a nobleman fighting the odds is a sight for the gods:  and I wouldn’t yield an inch of ground.  It’s no use calling things by fine names—­the country’s ruined by cowardice.  Poursuivez!  I cry.  Haro! at them!  The biggest hart wins in the end.  I haven’t a doubt about that.  And I haven’t a doubt we carry the tonnage.’

‘There’s the people,’ sighed Nevil, entangled in his uncle’s haziness.

‘What people?’

‘I suppose the people of Great Britain count, sir.’

‘Of course they do; when the battle’s done, the fight lost and won.’

‘Do you expect the people to look on, sir?’

‘The people always wait for the winner, boy Nevil.’

The young fellow exclaimed despondingly, ‘If it were a race!’

‘It’s like a race, and we’re confoundedly out of training,’ said Everard.

There he rested.  A mediaeval gentleman with the docile notions of the twelfth century, complacently driving them to grass and wattling them in the nineteenth, could be of no use to a boy trying to think, though he could set the youngster galloping.  Nevil wandered about the woods of Steynham, disinclined to shoot and lend a hand to country sports.  The popping of the guns of his uncle and guests hung about his ears much like their speech, which was unobjectionable in itself, but not sufficient; a little hard, he thought, a little idle.  He wanted something, and wanted them to give their time and energy to something, that was not to be had in a market.  The nobles, he felt sure, might resume their natural alliance with the people, and lead them, as they did of old, to the battle-field.  How might they?  A comely Sussex lass could not well tell him how.  Sarcastic reports of the troublesome questioner represented him applying to a nymph of the country for enlightenment.  He thrilled surprisingly under the charm of feminine beauty.  ’The fellow’s sound at bottom,’ his uncle said, hearing of his having really been seen walking in the complete form proper to his budding age, that is, in two halves.  Nevil showed that