rey called on the man Shrapnel yesterday
evening at six o'clock.'

'Yes, Papa?'

'Now come and see the fittings below,' the colonel addressed Lord
Lockrace, and murmured to his daughter:

'And soundly horsewhipped him!'

Cecilia turned on the instant to gaze after Nevil Beauchamp. She could
have wept for pity. Her father's emphasis on 'soundly' declared an
approval of the deed, and she was chilled by a sickening abhorrence and
dread of the cruel brute in men, such as, awakened by she knew not what,
had haunted her for a year of her girlhood.

'And he deserved it!' the colonel pursued, on emerging from the cabin at
Lord Lockrace's heels. 'I've no doubt he richly deserved it. The writer
of that letter we heard Captain Baskelett read the other day deserves
the very worst he gets.'

'Baskelett bored the Club the other night with a letter of a Radical
fellow,' said Lord Lockrace. 'Men who write that stuff should be strung
up and whipped by the common hangman.'

'It was a private letter,' said Cecilia.

'Public or private, Miss Halkett.'

Her mind flew back to Seymour Austin for the sense of stedfastness when
she heard such language as this, which, taken in conjunction with Dr.
Shrapnel's, seemed to uncloak our Constitutional realm and show it
boiling up with the frightful elements of primitive societies.

'I suppose we are but half civilized,' she said.

'If that,' said the earl.

Colonel Halkett protested that he never could quite make out what
Radicals were driving at.

'The rents,' Lord Lockrace observed in the conclusive tone of brevity.
He did not stay very long.

The schooner was boarded subsequently by another nobleman, an Admiral of
the Fleet and ex-minister of the Whig Government, Lord Croyston, who
was a friend of Mr. Romfrey's, and thought well of Nevil Beauchamp as
a seaman and naval officer, but shook an old head over him as a
politician. He came to beg a passage across the water to his marine
Lodge, an accident having happened early in the morning to his yacht,
the Lady Violet. He was able to communicate the latest version of the
horsewhipping of Dr. Shrapnel, from which it appeared that after
Mr. Romfrey had handsomely flogged the man he flung his card on the
prostrate body, to let men know who was responsible for the act. He
expected that Mr. Romfrey would be subjected to legal proceedings. 'But
if there's a pleasure worth paying for it's the trouncing of a villain,'
said he; and he had bee