ship and riding hard at the earldom. His elevation occurred
at a period of life that would have been a season of decay with most
men; but the prolonged and lusty Autumn of the veteran took new fires
from a tangible object to live for. His brother Craven's death had
slightly stupefied, and it had grieved him: it seemed to him peculiarly
pathetic; for as he never calculated on the happening of mortal
accidents to men of sound constitution, the circumstance imparted a
curious shake to his own solidity. It was like the quaking of earth,
which tries the balance of the strongest. If he had not been raised
to so splendid a survey of the actual world, he might have been led to
think of the imaginary, where perchance a man may meet his old dogs
and a few other favourites, in a dim perpetual twilight. Thither at all
events Craven had gone, and goodnight to him! The earl was a rapidly
lapsing invalid. There could be no doubt that Everard was to be the head
of his House.

Outwardly he was the same tolerant gentleman who put aside the poor
fools of the world to walk undisturbed by them in the paths he had
chosen: in this aspect he knew himself: nor was the change so great
within him as to make him cognizant of a change. It was only a secret
turn in the bent of the mind, imperceptible as the touch of the cunning
artist's brush on a finished portrait, which will alter the expression
without discomposing a feature, so that you cannot say it is another
face, yet it is not the former one. His habits were invariable, as were
his meditations. He thought less of Romfrey Castle than of his dogs and
his devices for trapping vermin; his interest in birds and beasts
and herbs, 'what ninnies call Nature in books,' to quote him, was
undiminished; imagination he had none to clap wings to his head and be
off with it. He betrayed as little as he felt that the coming Earl of
Romfrey was different from the cadet of the family.

A novel sharpness in the 'Stop that,' with which he crushed Beauchamp's
affectedly gentle and unusually roundabout opening of the vexed Shrapnel
question, rang like a shot in the room at Steynham, and breathed a
different spirit from his customary easy pugnacity that welcomed and
lured on an adversary to wild outhitting. Some sorrowful preoccupation
is, however, to be expected in the man who has lost a brother, and some
degree of irritability at the intrusion of past disputes. He chose to
repeat a similar brief forbidding of t