to a greater likeness
to the dead, as it becomes a creature to be who is coupled with one of
their body. Meanwhile I shall have news of you. I trust that soon I may
be warranted in forwarding congratulations to Lord Romfrey.'

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 Romfr