Halkett wished to peruse the matter with his own eyes, but Cecil could not permit it; he must read it aloud for them, and he suited his action to his sentences.  Had Rosamund been accustomed to leading articles which are the composition of men of an imposing vocabulary, she would have recognized and as good as read one in Cecil’s gestures as he tilted his lofty stature forward and back, marking his commas and semicolons with flapping of his elbows, and all but doubling his body at his periods.  Mr. Romfrey had enough of it half-way down the column; his head went sharply to left and right.  Cecil’s peculiar foppish slicing down of his hand pictured him protesting that there was more and finer of the inimitable stuff to follow.  The end of the scene exhibited the paper on the turf, and Colonel Halkett’s hand on Cecil’s shoulder, Mr. Romfrey nodding some sort of acquiescence over the muzzle of his gun, whether reflective or positive Rosamund could not decide.  She sent out a footman for the paper, and was presently communing with its eloquent large type, quite unable to perceive where the comicality or the impropriety of it lay, for it would have struck her that never were truer things of Nevil Beauchamp better said in the tone befitting them.  This perhaps was because she never heard fervid praises of him, or of anybody, delivered from the mouth, and it is not common to hear Englishmen phrasing great eulogies of one another.  Still, as a rule, they do not object to have it performed in that region of our national eloquence, the Press, by an Irishman or a Scotchman.  And what could there be to warrant Captain Baskelett’s malicious derision, and Mr. Romfrey’s nodding assent to it, in an article where all was truth?

The truth was mounted on an unusually high wind.  It was indeed a leading article of a banner-like bravery, and the unrolling of it was designed to stir emotions.  Beauchamp was the theme.  Nevil had it under his eyes earlier than Cecil.  The paper was brought into his room with the beams of day, damp from the presses of the Bevisham Gazette, exactly opposite to him in the White Hart Hotel, and a glance at the paragraphs gave him a lively ardour to spring to his feet.  What writing!  He was uplifted as ‘The heroical Commander Beauchamp, of the Royal Navy,’ and ’Commander Beauchamp, R.N., a gentleman of the highest connections’:  he was ’that illustrious Commander Beauchamp, of our matchless, navy, who proved on every field of the last glorious war of this country that the traditional valour of the noble and indomitable blood transmitted to his veins had lost none of its edge and weight since the battle-axes of the Lords de Romfrey, ever to the fore, clove the skulls of our national enemy on the wide and fertile campaigns of France.’  This was pageantry.