her admit to herself
that she belonged irrevocably to him, while her thoughts were upon
Beauchamp. With a respectful gravity he submitted to her perusal a
collection of treatises on diet, classed pro and con., and paged and
pencil-marked to simplify her study of the question. They sketched in
company; she played music to him, he read poetry to her, and read
it well. He seemed to feel the beauty of it sensitively, as she did
critically. In other days the positions had been reversed. He invariably
talked of Beauchamp with kindness, deploring only that he should be
squandering his money on workmen's halls and other hazy projects down in
Bevisham.

'Lydiard tells me he has a very sound idea of the value of money,
and has actually made money by cattle breeding; but he has flung ten
thousand pounds on a single building outside the town, and he'll have
to endow it to support it--a Club to educate Radicals. The fact is, he
wants to jam the business of two or three centuries into a life-time.
These men of their so-called progress are like the majority of religious
minds: they can't believe without seeing and touching. That is to say,
they don't believe in the abstract at all, but they go to work blindly
by agitating, and proselytizing, and persecuting to get together a mass
they can believe in. You see it in their way of arguing; it's half
done with the fist. Lydiard tells me he left him last in a horrible
despondency about progress. Ha! ha! Beauchamp's no Radical. He hasn't
forgiven the Countess of Romfrey for marrying above her rank. He may
be a bit of a Republican: but really in this country Republicans are
fighting with the shadow of an old hat and a cockhorse. I beg to state
that I have a reverence for constituted authority: I speak of what those
fellows are contending with.'

'Right,' said Colonel Halkett. 'But "the shadow of an old hat and a
cockhorse": what does that mean?'

'That's what our Republicans are hitting at, sir.'

'Ah! so; yes,' quoth the colonel. 'And I say this to Nevil Beauchamp,
that what we've grown up well with, powerfully with, it's base
ingratitude and dangerous folly to throw over.'

He blamed Beauchamp for ingratitude to the countess, who had, he
affirmed of his own knowledge, married Lord Romfrey to protect
Beauchamp's interests.

A curious comment on this allegation was furnished by the announcement
of the earl's expectations of a son and heir. The earl wrote to Colonel
Halkett from Romfre