There had been women of the earl’s illustrious House who would have given their hands to the axe rather than conceal a stain and have to dread a scandal.  His Rosamund, after all, was of their pattern; even though she blew that conscience she prattled of into trifles, and swelled them, as women of high birth in this country, out of the clutches of the priests, do not do.

She clung to him for his promise to go.

He said:  ‘Well, well.’

‘That means, you will,’ said she.

His not denying it passed for the affirmative.

Then indeed she bloomed with love of him.

‘Yet do say yes,’ she begged.

‘I’ll go, ma’am,’ shouted the earl.  ‘I’ll go, my love,’ he said softly.

CHAPTER LIII

THE APOLOGY TO DR. SHRAPNEL

‘You and Nevil are so alike,’ Lady Romfrey said to her lord, at some secret resemblance she detected and dwelt on fondly, when the earl was on the point of starting a second time for Bevisham to perform what she had prompted him to conceive his honourable duty, without a single intimation that he loathed the task, neither shrug nor grimace.

’Two ends of a stick are pretty much alike:  they’re all that length apart,’ said he, very little in the humour for compliments, however well braced for his work.

His wife’s admiring love was pleasant enough.  He preferred to have it unspoken.  Few of us care to be eulogized in the act of taking a nauseous medical mixture.

For him the thing was as good as done, on his deciding to think it both adviseable and right:  so he shouldered his load and marched off with it.  He could have postponed the right proceeding, even after the partial recognition of his error:—­one drops a word or two by hazard, one expresses an anxiety to afford reparation, one sends a message, and so forth, for the satisfaction of one’s conventionally gentlemanly feeling:  but the adviseable proceeding under stress of peculiar circumstances, his clearly-awakened recognition of that, impelled him unhesitatingly.  His wife had said it was the portion she brought him.  Tears would not have persuaded him so powerfully, that he might prove to her he was glad of her whatever the portion she brought.  She was a good wife, a brave woman, likely to be an incomparable mother.  At present her very virtues excited her to fancifulness nevertheless she was in his charge, and he was bound to break the neck of his will, to give her perfect peace of wind.  The child suffers from the mother’s mental agitation.  It might be a question of a nervous or an idiot future Earl of Romfrey.  Better death to the House than such a mockery of his line!  These reflections reminded him of the heartiness of his whipping of that poor old tumbled signpost Shrapnel, in the name of outraged womankind.  If there was no outrage?

Assuredly if there was no outrage, consideration for the state of his wife would urge him to speak the apology in the most natural manner possible.  She vowed there was none.