im always as in a picture, remote from
herself. His loftier social station and strange character precluded any
of those keen suspicions by which women learn that a fire is beginning
to glow near them.

'How I should like to have known your father!' he said. 'I don't wonder
at Dr. Shrapnel's love of him. Yes, he was one of the great men of his
day! and it's a higher honour to be of his blood than any that rank can
give. You were ten years old when you lost him. Describe him to me.'

'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 herse