’For the existing order of things; for his beef and ale; for the titles he is accustomed to read in the papers.  You don’t study your countrymen.’

‘I’d study that fellow, if I had the chance.’

’You would probably find him one of the emptiest, with a rather worse temper than most of them.’

Beauchamp shook Lydiard’s hand, saying, ‘The widow?’

‘There’s no woman like her!’

‘Well, now you’re free—­why not?  I think I put one man out of the field.’

‘Too early!  Besides—­’

‘Repeat that, and you may have to say too late.’

‘When shall you go down to Bevisham?’

’When?  I can’t tell:  when I’ve gone through fire.  There never was a home for me like the cottage, and the old man, and the dear good girl—­the best of girls! if you hadn’t a little spoilt her with your philosophy of the two sides of the case.’

‘I’ve not given her the brains.’

’She’s always doubtful of doing, doubtful of action:  she has no will.  So she is fatalistic, and an argument between us ends in her submitting, as if she must submit to me, because I’m overbearing, instead of accepting the fact.’

‘She feels your influence.’

’She’s against the publication of the dawn—­for the present.  It’s an “unseasonable time.”  I argue with her:  I don’t get hold of her mind a bit; but at last she says, “very well.”  She has your head.’

And you have her heart, Lydiard could have rejoined.

They said good-bye, neither of them aware of the other’s task of endurance.

As they were parting, Beauchamp perceived his old comrade Jack Wilmore walking past.

‘Jack!’ he called.

Wilmore glanced round.  ‘How do you do, Beauchamp?’

‘Where are you off to, Jack?’

‘Down to the Admiralty.  I’m rather in a hurry; I have an appointment.’

‘Can’t you stop just a minute?’

‘I’m afraid I can’t.  Good morning.’

It was incredible; but this old friend, the simplest heart alive, retreated without a touch of his hand, and with a sorely wounded air.

‘That newspaper article appears to have been generally read,’ Beauchamp said to Lydiard, who answered: 

’The article did not put the idea of you into men’s minds, but gave tongue to it:  you may take it for an instance of the sagacity of the Press.’

’You wouldn’t take that man and me to have been messmates for years!  Old Jack Wilmore!  Don’t go, Lydiard.’

Lydiard declared that he was bound to go:  he was engaged to read Italian for an hour with Mrs. Wardour-Devereux.

‘Then go, by all means,’ Beauchamp dismissed him.

He felt as if he had held a review of his friends and enemies on the door-step, and found them of one colour.  If it was an accident befalling him in a London square during a space of a quarter of an hour, what of the sentiments of universal England?  Lady Barbara’s elopement with Lord Alfred last year did not rouse much execration; hardly worse than gossip and compassion.  Beauchamp drank a great deal of bitterness from his reflections.