’I commit no injustice unless with sufficient reason.  It is an estimable youth, as shown by his devotion to a peerless woman.  To endow her with his name and fortune is his only thought.’

’I perceive; an excellent young fellow!  I have an incipient liking for this young Alonzo.  You must not permit my duchess to laugh at him.  Encourage her rather to advance his suit.  The silliness of a young man will be no bad spectacle.  Chloe, then.  You have set my mind at rest, Beamish, and it is but another obligation added to the heap; so, if I do not speak of payment, the reason is that I know you would not have me bankrupt.’

The remainder of the colloquy of the duke and Mr. Beamish referred to the date of her Grace’s coming to the Wells, the lodgement she was to receive, and other minor arrangements bearing upon her state and comfort; the duke perpetually observing, ‘But I leave it all to you, Beamish,’ when he had laid down precise instructions in these respects, even to the specification of the shopkeepers, the confectioner and the apothecary, who were to balance or cancel one another in the opposite nature of their supplies, and the haberdasher and the jeweller, with whom she was to make her purchases.  For the duke had a recollection of giddy shops, and of giddy shopmen too; and it was by serving as one for a day that a certain great nobleman came to victory with a jealously guarded dame beautiful as Venus.  ‘I would have challenged the goddess!’ he cried, and subsided from his enthusiasm plaintively, like a weak wind instrument.  ’So there you see the prudence of a choice of shops.  But I leave it to you, Beamish.’  Similarly the great military commander, having done whatsoever a careful prevision may suggest to insure him victory, casts himself upon Providence, with the hope of propitiating the unanticipated and darkly possible.

CHAPTER III

The splendid equipage of a coach and six, with footmen in scarlet and green, carried Beau Beamish five miles along the road on a sunny day to meet the young duchess at the boundary of his territory, and conduct her in state to the Wells.  Chloe sat beside him, receiving counsel with regard to her prospective duties.  He was this day the consummate beau, suave, but monarchical, and his manner of speech partook of his external grandeur.  ’Spy me the horizon, and apprise me if somewhere you distinguish a chariot,’ he said, as they drew up on the rise of a hill of long descent, where the dusty roadway sank between its brown hedges, and crawled mounting from dry rush-spotted hollows to corn fields on a companion height directly facing them, at a remove of about three-quarters of a mile.  Chloe looked forth, while the beau passingly raised his hat for coolness, and murmured, with a glance down the sultry track:  ‘It sweats the eye to see!’

Presently Chloe said, ’Now a dust blows.  Something approaches.  Now I discern horses, now a vehicle; and it is a chariot!’