‘He used to play with me like a boy,’ said Jenny.  She described her father from a child’s recollection of him.

’Dr. Shrapnel declares he would have been one of the first surgeons in Europe:  and he was one of the first of poets,’ Beauchamp pursued with enthusiasm.  ’So he was doubly great.  I hold a good surgeon to be in the front rank of public benefactors—­where they put rich brewers, bankers, and speculative manufacturers now.  Well! the world is young.  We shall alter that in time.  Whom did your father marry?’

Jenny answered, ’My mother was the daughter of a London lawyer.  She married without her father’s approval of the match, and he left her nothing.’

Beauchamp interjected:  ‘Lawyer’s money!’

’It would have been useful to my mother’s household when I was an infant,’ said Jenny.

‘Poor soul!  I suppose so.  Yes; well,’ Beauchamp sighed.  ’Money! never mind how it comes.  We’re in such a primitive condition that we catch at anything to keep us out of the cold; dogs with a bone!—­instead of living, as Dr. Shrapnel prophecies, for and, with one another.  It’s war now, and money’s the weapon of war.  And we’re the worst nation in Europe for that.  But if we fairly recognize it, we shall be the first to alter our ways.  There’s the point.  Well, Jenny, I can look you in the face to-night.  Thanks to my uncle Everard at last!’

‘Captain Beauchamp, you have never been blamed.’

’I am Captain Beauchamp by courtesy, in public.  My friends call me Nevil.  I think I have heard the name on your lips?’

‘When you were very ill.’

He stood closer to her, very close.

’Which was the arm that bled for me?  May I look at it?  There was a bruise.’

’Have you not forgotten that trifle?  There is the faintest possible mark of it left.’

‘I wish to see.’

She gently defended the arm, but he made it so much a matter of earnest to see the bruise of the old Election missile on her fair arm, that, with a pardonable soft blush, to avoid making much of it herself, she turned her sleeve a little above the wrist.  He took her hand.

‘It was for me!’

‘It was quite an accident:  no harm was intended.’

‘But it was in my cause—­for me!’

‘Indeed, Captain Beauchamp . . .’

‘Nevil, we say indoors.’

‘Nevil—­but is it not wiser to say what comes naturally to us?’

’Who told you to-day that you had brought me to life?  I am here to prove it true.  If I had paid attention to your advice, I should not have gone into the cottage of those poor creatures and taken away the fever.  I did no good there.  But the man’s wife said her husband had been ruined by voting for me:  and it was a point of honour to go in and sit with him.  You are not to have your hand back:  it is mine.  Don’t you remember, Jenny, how you gave me your arm on the road when I staggered; two days before the fever knocked