ed at his big blustering cousin
Cecil to vindicate her good name. The direful youths fought in the
Steynham stables, overheard by the grooms. Everard received a fine
account of the tussle from these latter, and Rosamund, knowing him to be
of the order of gentlemen who, whatsoever their sins, will at all costs
protect a woman's delicacy, and a dependant's, man or woman, did not fear
to have her ears shocked in probing him on the subject.

Everard was led to say that Nevil's cousins were bedevilled with
womanfolk.

From which Rosamund perceived that women had been at work; and if so, it
was upon the business of the scandal-monger; and if so, Nevil fought his
cousin to protect her good name from a babbler of the family gossip.

She spoke to Stukely Culbrett, her dead husband's friend, to whose
recommendation she was indebted for her place in Everard Romfrey's
household.

'Nevil behaved like a knight, I hear.'

'Your beauty was disputed,' said he, 'and Nevil knocked the blind man
down for not being able to see.'

She thought, 'Not my beauty! Nevil struck his cousin on behalf of the
only fair thing I have left to me!'

This was a moment with her when many sensations rush together and form a
knot in sensitive natures. She had been very good-looking. She was
good-looking still, but she remembered the bloom of her looks in her
husband's days (the tragedy of the mirror is one for a woman to write: I
am ashamed to find myself smiling while the poor lady weeps), she
remembered his praises, her pride; his death in battle, her anguish:
then, on her strange entry to this house, her bitter wish to be older;
and then, the oppressive calm of her recognition of her wish's
fulfilment, the heavy drop to dead earth, when she could say, or pretend
to think she could say--I look old enough: will they tattle of me now?
Nevil's championship of her good name brought her history spinning about
her head, and threw a finger of light on her real position. In that she
saw the slenderness of her hold on respect, as well as felt her personal
stainlessness. The boy warmed her chill widowhood. It was written that
her, second love should be of the pattern of mother's love. She loved him
hungrily and jealously, always in fear for him when he was absent, even
anxiously when she had him near. For some cause, born, one may fancy, of
the hour of her love's conception, his image in her heart was steeped in
tears. She was not, happily, one of the women w