e avenues leading
to the castle and his wife's apartments; and he could believe that he
had undertaken as good a defence as the mountain guarding the fertile
vale from storms: but him the elements pelted heavily. Letters from
acquaintances of Nevil, from old shipmates and from queer political
admirers and opponents, hailed on him; things not to be frigidly read
were related of the fellow.

Lord Romfrey's faith in the power of constitution to beat disease
battled sturdily with the daily reports of his physician and friends,
whom he had directed to visit the cottage on the common outside
Bevisham, and with Miss Denham's intercepted letters to the countess.
Still he had to calculate on the various injuries Nevil had done to his
constitution, which had made of him another sort of man for a struggle
of life and death than when he stood like a riddled flag through the
war. That latest freak of the fellow's, the abandonment of our natural
and wholesome sustenance in animal food, was to be taken in the
reckoning. Dr. Gannet did not allude to it; the Bevisham doctor did; and
the earl meditated with a fury of wrath on the dismal chance that such
a folly as this of one old vegetable idiot influencing a younger noodle,
might strike his House to the dust.

His watch over his wife had grown mechanical: he failed to observe that
her voice was missing. She rarely spoke. He lost the art of observing
himself: the wrinkling up and dropping of his brows became his habitual
language. So long as he had not to meet inquiries or face tears, he
enjoyed the sense of security. He never quitted his wife save to walk to
the Southern park lodge, where letters and telegrams were piled awaiting
him; and she was forbidden to take the air on the castle terrace without
his being beside her, lest a whisper, some accident of the kind that
donkeys who nod over their drowsy nose-length-ahead precautions call
fatality, should rouse her to suspect, and in a turn of the hand undo
his labour: for the race was getting terrible: Death had not yet stepped
out of that evil chamber in Dr. Shrapnel's cottage to aim his javelin at
the bosom containing the prized young life to come, but, like the smoke
of waxing fire, he shadowed forth his presence in wreaths blacker and
thicker day by day: and Everard Romfrey knew that the hideous beast of
darkness had only to spring up and pass his guard to deal a blow to his
House the direr from all he supposed himself to have gaine