nd
asked him.

The weighty and the trivial contended; no fitting message could be
thought of.

'You are unused to real suffering--that is for women!--and want to be
doing instead of enduring,' said Rosamund.

She was beginning to put faith in the innocence of these two mortally
sick lovers. Beauchamp's outcries against himself gave her the shadows of
their story. He stood in tears--a thing to see to believe of Nevil
Beauchamp; and plainly he did not know it, or else he would have taken
her advice to him to leave the house at an hour that was long past
midnight. Her method for inducing him to go was based on her intimate
knowledge of him: she made as if to soothe and kiss him compassionately.

In the morning there was a flying word from Roland, on his way to
England. Rosamund tempered her report of Renee by saying of her, that she
was very quiet. He turned to the window.

'Look, what a climate ours is!' Beauchamp abused the persistent fog.
'Dull, cold, no sky, a horrible air to breathe! This is what she has come
to! Has she spoken of me yet?'

'No.'

'Is she dead silent?'

'She answers, if I speak to her.'

'I believe, ma'am,' said Beauchamp, 'that we are the coldest-hearted
people in Europe.'

Rosamund did not defend us, or the fog. Consequently nothing was left for
him to abuse but himself. In that she tried to moderate him, and drew
forth a torrent of self-vituperation, after which he sank into the
speechless misery he had been evading; until sophistical fancy, another
evolution of his nature, persuaded him that Roland, seeing Renee, would
for love's sake be friendly to them.

'I should have told you, Nevil, by the way, that the earl is dead,' said
Rosamund.

'Her brother will be here to-day; he can't be later than the evening,'
said Beauchamp. 'Get her to eat, ma'am; you must. Command her to eat.
This terrible starvation!'

'You ate nothing yourself, Nevil, all day yesterday.'

He surveyed the table. 'You have your cook in town, I see. Here's a
breakfast to feed twenty hungry families in Spitalfields. Where does the
mass of meat go? One excess feeds another. You're overdone with servants.
Gluttony, laziness, and pilfering come of your host of unmanageable
footmen and maids; you stuff them, and wonder they're idle and immoral.
If--I suppose I must call him the earl now, or Colonel Halkett, or any
one of the army of rich men, hear of an increase of the income-tax, or
some poor wretch hints at a slid