little nursery wife?'

Very much the contrary to anything of the sort, he declared; and he
proved his honesty by announcing an immediate reflection that had come
to him: 'How oddly things are settled! Cecilia Halkett and Tuckham; you
and I! Now, I know for certain that I have brought Cecilia Halkett out
of her woman's Toryism, and given her at least liberal views, and she
goes and marries an arrant Tory; while you, a bit of a Tory at heart,
more than anything else, have married an ultra.'

'Perhaps we may hope that the conflict will be seasonable on both
sides?--if you give me fair play, Nevil!'

As fair play as a woman's lord could give her, she was to have; with
which, adieu to argumentation and controversy, and all the thanks in
life to the parson! On a lovely island, free from the seductions of
care, possessing a wife who, instead of starting out of romance and
poetry with him to the supreme honeymoon, led him back to those forsaken
valleys of his youth, and taught him the joys of colour and sweet
companionship, simple delights, a sister mind, with a loveliness of
person and nature unimagined by him, Beauchamp drank of a happiness that
neither Renee nor Cecilia had promised. His wooing of Jenny Beauchamp
was a flattery richer than any the maiden Jenny Denham could have deemed
her due; and if his wonder in experiencing such strange gladness was
quaintly ingenuous, it was delicious to her to see and know full surely
that he who was at little pains to court, or please, independently of
the agency of the truth in him, had come to be her lover through being
her husband.

Here I would stop. It is Beauchamp's career that carries me on to its
close, where the lanterns throw their beams off the mudbanks by the
black riverside; when some few English men and women differed from the
world in thinking that it had suffered a loss.

They sorrowed for the earl when tidings came to them of the loss of his
child, alive one hour in his arms. Rosamund caused them to be deceived
as to her condition. She survived; she wrote to Jenny, bidding her keep
her husband cruising. Lord Romfrey added a brief word: he told Nevil
that he would see no one for the present; hoped he would be absent a
year, not a day less. To render it the more easily practicable, in the
next packet of letters Colonel Halkett and Cecilia begged them not to
bring the Esperanza home for the yachting season: the colonel said his
daughter was to be married in April, an