Lady Blandish dried her tears as she knelt, and then joined him, and glanced up silently at Richard’s moon standing in wane toward the West.  She hoped it was because of her having been premature in pleading so earnestly, that she had failed to move him, and she accused herself more than the baronet.  But in acting as she had done, she had treated him as no common man, and she was compelled to perceive that his heart was at present hardly superior to the hearts of ordinary men, however composed his face might be, and apparently serene his wisdom.  From that moment she grew critical of him, and began to study her idol—­a process dangerous to idols.  He, now that she seemed to have relinquished the painful subject, drew to her, and as one who wished to smooth a foregone roughness, murmured:  “God’s rarest blessing is, after all, a good woman!  My Emmeline bears her sleepless night well.  She does not shame the day.”  He gazed down on her with a fondling tenderness.

“I could bear many, many!” she replied, meeting his eyes, “and you would see me look better and better, if...if only...” but she had no encouragement to end the sentence.

Perhaps he wanted some mute form of consolation; perhaps the handsome placid features of the dark-eyed dame touched him:  at any rate their Platonism was advanced by his putting an arm about her.  She felt the arm and talked of the morning.

Thus proximate, they by and by both heard something very like a groan behind them, and looking round, beheld the Saurian eye.  Lady Blandish smiled, but the baronet’s discomposure was not to be concealed.  By a strange fatality every stage of their innocent loves was certain to have a human beholder.

“Oh, I’m sure I beg pardon,” Benson mumbled, arresting his head in a melancholy pendulosity.  He was ordered out of the room.

“And I think I shall follow him, and try to get forty winks,” said Lady Blandish.  They parted with a quiet squeeze of hands.

The baronet then called in Benson.

“Get me my breakfast as soon as you can,” he said, regardless of the aspect of injured conscience Benson sombrely presented to him.  “I am going to town early.  And, Benson,” he added, “you will also go to town this afternoon, or to-morrow, if it suits you, and take your book with you to Mr. Thompson.  You will not return here.  A provision will be made for you.  You can go.”

The heavy butler essayed to speak, but the tremendous blow and the baronet’s gesture choked him.  At the door he made another effort which shook the rolls of his loose skin pitiably.  An impatient signal sent him out dumb,—­and Raynham was quit of the one believer in the Great Shaddock dogma.

CHAPTER XXXIV

It was the month of July.  The Solent ran up green waves before a full-blowing South-wester.  Gay little yachts bounded out like foam, and flashed their sails, light as sea-nymphs.  A crown of deep Summer blue topped the flying mountains of cloud.