ned to be the favourite of the old housekeeper, who liked him for
his haughtiness, which was to her thinking the sign of real English
nobility, and perhaps it is the popular sign, and a tonic to the people.
She raised lamentations over the shame of the locking of the door
against him that awful night, declaring she had almost mustered courage
to go down to him herself, in spite of Mrs. Calling's orders. The old
woman lowered her voice to tell him that her official superior had
permitted the French gentleman and ladies to call her countess. This she
knew for a certainty, though she knew nothing of French; but the French
lady who came second brought a maid who knew English a little, and she
said the very words--the countess, and said also that her party took
Mrs. Culling for the Countess of Romfrey. What was more, my lord's
coachman caught it up, and he called her countess, and he had a quarrel
about it with the footman Kendall; and the day after a dreadful affair
between them in the mews, home drives madam, and Kendall is to go up to
her, and down the poor man comes, and not a word to be got out of him,
but as if he had seen a ghost. 'She have such power,' Cecil's admirer
concluded.

'I wager I match her,' Cecil said to himself, pulling at his wristbands
and letting his lower teeth shine out. The means of matching her
were not so palpable as the resolution. First he took men into his
confidence. Then he touched lightly on the story to ladies, with the
question, 'What ought I to do?' In consideration for the Earl of Romfrey
he ought not to pass it over, he suggested. The ladies of the family
urged him to go to Steynham and boldly confront the woman. He was not
prepared for that. Better, it seemed to him, to blow the rumour, and
make it the topic of the season, until Lord Romfrey should hear of it.
Cecil had the ear of the town for a month. He was in the act of slicing
the air with his right hand in his accustomed style, one evening at Lady
Elsea's, to protest how vast was the dishonour done to the family by
Mistress Culling, when Stukely Culbrett stopped him, saying, 'The lady
you speak of is the Countess of Romfrey. I was present at the marriage.'

Cecil received the shock in the attitude of those martial figures we see
wielding two wooden swords in provincial gardens to tell the disposition
of the wind: abruptly abandoned by it, they stand transfixed, one
sword aloft, the other at their heels. The resemblance extended t