‘Nothing tires me,’ said he.

With that they stepped on together.

Mount Laurels, a fair broad house backed by a wood of beeches and firs, lay open to view on the higher grassed knoll of a series of descending turfy mounds dotted with gorseclumps, and faced South-westerly along the run of the Otley river to the gleaming broad water and its opposite border of forest, beyond which the downs of the island threw long interlapping curves.  Great ships passed on the line of the water to and fro; and a little mist of masts of the fishing and coasting craft by Otley village, near the river’s mouth, was like a web in air.  Cecilia led him to her dusky wood of firs, where she had raised a bower for a place of poetical contemplation and reading when the clear lapping salt river beneath her was at high tide.  She could hail the Esperanza from that cover; she could step from her drawing-room window, over the flower-beds, down the gravel walk to the hard, and be on board her yacht within seven minutes, out on her salt-water lake within twenty, closing her wings in a French harbour by nightfall of a summer’s day, whenever she had the whim to fly abroad.  Of these enviable privileges she boasted with some happy pride.

‘It’s the finest yachting-station in England,’ said Beauchamp.

She expressed herself very glad that he should like it so much.  Unfortunately she added, ’I hope you will find it pleasanter to be here than canvassing.’

‘I have no pleasure in canvassing,’ said he.  ’I canvass poor men accustomed to be paid for their votes, and who get nothing from me but what the baron would call a parsonical exhortation.  I’m in the thick of the most spiritless crew in the kingdom.  Our southern men will not compare with the men of the north.  But still, even among these fellows, I see danger for the country if our commerce were to fail, if distress came on them.  There’s always danger in disunion.  That’s what the rich won’t see.  They see simply nothing out of their own circle; and they won’t take a thought of the overpowering contrast between their luxury and the way of living, that’s half-starving, of the poor.  They understand it when fever comes up from back alleys and cottages, and then they join their efforts to sweep the poor out of the district.  The poor are to get to their work anyhow, after a long morning’s walk over the proscribed space; for we must have poor, you know.  The wife of a parson I canvassed yesterday, said to me, “Who is to work for us, if you do away with the poor, Captain Beauchamp?"’

Cecilia quitted her bower and traversed the wood silently.

’So you would blow up my poor Mount Laurels for a peace-offering to the lower classes?’

‘I should hope to put it on a stronger foundation, Cecilia.’

‘By means of some convulsion?’

‘By forestalling one.’

‘That must be one of the new ironclads,’ observed Cecilia, gazing at the black smoke-pennon of a tower that slipped along the water-line.  ’Yes?  You were saying?  Put us on a stronger——?’