’My dear, a ship’s not lost because she’s caught in a squall; nor a man buffeting the waves for an hour.  He’s all right:  he keeps up.’

‘He is delirious?  I ask you—­I have fancied I heard him.’

Lord Romfrey puffed from his nostrils:  but in affecting to blow to the winds her foolish woman’s wildness of fancy, his mind rested on Nevil, and he said:  ‘Poor boy!  It seems he’s chattering hundreds to the minute.’

His wife’s looks alarmed him after he had said it, and he was for toning it and modifying it, when she gasped to him to help her to her feet; and standing up, she exclaimed:  ’O heaven! now I hear you; now I know he lives.  See how much better it is for me to know the real truth.  It takes me to his bedside.  Ignorance and suspense have been poison.  I have been washed about like a dead body.  Let me read all my letters now.  Nothing will harm me now.  You will do your best for me, my husband, will you not?’ She tore at her dress at her throat for coolness, panting and smiling.  ’For me—­us—­yours—­ours!  Give me my letters, lunch with me, and start for Bevisham.  Now you see how good it is for me to hear the very truth, you will give me your own report, and I shall absolutely trust in it, and go down with it if it’s false!  But you see I am perfectly strong for the truth.  It must be you or I to go.  I burn to go; but your going will satisfy me.  If you look on him, I look.  I feel as if I had been nailed down in a coffin, and have got fresh air.  I pledge you my word, sir, my honour, my dear husband, that I will think first of my duty.  I know it would be Nevil’s wish.  He has not quite forgiven me—­he thought me ambitious—­ah! stop:  he said that the birth of our child would give him greater happiness than he had known for years:  he begged me to persuade you to call a boy Nevil Beauchamp, and a girl Renee.  He has never believed in his own long living.’

Rosamund refreshed her lord’s heart by smiling archly as she said:  ’The boy to be educated to take the side of the people, of course!  The girl is to learn a profession.’

‘Ha! bless the fellow!’ Lord Romfrey interjected.  ’Well, I might go there for an hour.  Promise me, no fretting!  You have hollows in your cheeks, and your underlip hangs:  I don’t like it.  I haven’t seen that before.’

‘We do not see clearly when we are trying to deceive,’ said Rosamund.  ’My letters! my letters!’

Lord Romfrey went to fetch them.  They were intact in his desk.  His wife, then, had actually been reading the facts through a wall!  For he was convinced of Mrs. Devereux’s fidelity, as well as of the colonel’s and Cecilia’s.  He was not a man to be disobeyed:  nor was his wife the woman to court or to acquiesce in trifling acts of disobedience to him.  He received the impression, consequently, that this matter of the visit to Nevil was one in which the poor loving soul might be allowed to guide him, singular as the intensity of her love of Nevil Beauchamp was, considering that they were not of kindred blood.