Rosamund handed the letters to her husband.  Not only did she think Miss Denham disingenuous, she saw that the girl was not in love with Beauchamp:  and the idea of a loveless marriage for him threw the mournfullest of Hecate’s beams along the course of a career that the passionate love of a bride, though she were not well-born and not wealthy, would have rosily coloured.

‘Without love!’ she exclaimed to herself.  She asked the earl’s opinion of the startling intelligence, and of the character of that Miss Denham, who could pen such a letter, after engaging to give her hand to Nevil.

Lord Romfrey laughed in his dumb way.  ’If Nevil must have a wife—­and the marquise tells you so, and she ought to know—­he may as well marry a girl who won’t go all the way down hill with him at his pace.  He’ll be cogged.’

‘You do not object to such an alliance?’

’I ‘m past objection.  There’s no law against a man’s marrying his nurse.’

‘But she is not even in love with him!’

’I dare say not.  He wants a wife:  she accepts a husband.  The two women who were in love with him he wouldn’t have.’

Lady Romfrey sighed deeply:  ’He has lost Cecilia!  She might still have been his:  but he has taken to that girl.  And Madame de Rouaillout praises the girl because—­oh!  I see it—­she has less to be jealous of in Miss Denham:  of whose birth and blood we know nothing.  Let that pass!  If only she loved him!  I cannot endure the thought of his marrying a girl who is not in love with him.’

‘Just as you like, my dear.’

‘I used to suspect Mr. Lydiard.’

‘Perhaps he’s the man.’

‘Oh, what an end of so brilliant a beginning!’

‘It strikes me, my dear,’ said the earl, ’it’s the proper common sense beginning that may have a fairish end.’

’No, but what I feel is that he—­our Nevil!—­has accomplished hardly anything, if anything!’

’He hasn’t marched on London with a couple of hundred thousand men:  no, he hasn’t done that,’ the earl said, glancing back in his mind through Beauchamp’s career.  ’And he escapes what Stukely calls his nation’s scourge, in the shape of a statue turned out by an English chisel.  No:  we haven’t had much public excitement out of him.  But one thing he did do:  he got me down on my knees!’

Lord Romfrey pronounced these words with a sober emphasis that struck the humour of it sharply into Rosamund’s heart, through some contrast it presented between Nevil’s aim at the world and hit of a man:  the immense deal thought of it by the earl, and the very little that Nevil would think of it—­the great domestic achievement to be boasted of by an enthusiastic devotee of politics!

She embraced her husband with peals of loving laughter:  the last laughter heard in Romfrey Castle for many a day.

CHAPTER LVI

THE LAST OF NEVIL BEAUCHAMP