decisively said 'No,' and Beauchamp had to yield.

That would have been an opportunity of speaking to her father without a
formal asking of leave. She knew it as well as Nevil Beauchamp.

Renee took his hand to be assisted in the step down to her father's arms,
murmuring:

'Do nothing--nothing! until you hear from me.'

CHAPTER XI

CAPTAIN BASKELETT

Our England, meanwhile, was bustling over the extinguished war, counting
the cost of it, with a rather rueful eye on Manchester, and soothing the
taxed by an exhibition of heroes at brilliant feasts. Of course, the
first to come home had the cream of the praises. She hugged them in a
manner somewhat suffocating to modest men, but heroism must be brought to
bear upon these excesses of maternal admiration; modesty, too, when it
accepts the place of honour at a public banquet, should not protest
overmuch. To be just, the earliest arrivals, which were such as reached
the shores of Albion before her war was at an end, did cordially
reciprocate the hug. They were taught, and they believed most naturally,
that it was quite as well to repose upon her bosom as to have stuck to
their posts. Surely there was a conscious weakness in the Spartans, who
were always at pains to discipline their men in heroical conduct, and
rewarded none save the stand-fasts. A system of that sort seems to betray
the sense of poverty in the article. Our England does nothing like it.
All are welcome home to her so long as she is in want of them. Besides,
she has to please the taxpayer. You may track a shadowy line or crazy
zigzag of policy in almost every stroke of her domestic history: either
it is the forethought finding it necessary to stir up an impulse, or else
dashing impulse gives a lively pull to the afterthought: policy becomes
evident somehow, clumsily very possibly. How can she manage an enormous
middle-class, to keep it happy, other than a little clumsily? The
managing of it at all is the wonder. And not only has she to stupefy the
taxpayer by a timely display of feastings and fireworks, she has to stop
all that nonsense (to quote a satiated man lightened in his purse) at the
right moment, about the hour when the old standfasts, who have simply
been doing duty, return, poor jog-trot fellows, and a complimentary motto
or two is the utmost she can present to them. On the other hand, it is
true she gives her first loves, those early birds, fully to understand
that a change has come in