and cruising. Lord Romfrey added a brief word: he told Nevil that he
would see no one for the present; hoped he would be absent a year, not a
day less. To render it the more easily practicable, in the next packet of
letters Colonel Halkett and Cecilia begged them not to bring the
Esperanza home for the yachting season: the colonel said his daughter was
to be married in April, and that bridegroom and bride had consented to
take an old man off with them to Italy; perhaps in the autumn all might
meet in Venice.

'And you've never seen Venice,' Beauchamp said to Jenny.

'Everything is new to me,' said she, penetrating and gladly joining the
conspiracy to have him out of England.

Dr. Shrapnel was not so compliant as the young husband. Where he could
land and botanize, as at Madeira, he let time fly and drum his wings on
air, but the cities of priests along the coast of Portugal and Spain
roused him to a burning sense of that flight of time and the vacuity it
told of in his labours. Greatly to his astonishment, he found that it was
no longer he and Beauchamp against Jenny, but Jenny and Beauchamp against
him.

'What!' he cried, 'to draw breath day by day, and not to pay for it by
striking daily at the rock Iniquity? Are you for that, Beauchamp? And in
a land where these priests walk with hats curled like the water-lily's
leaf without the flower? How far will you push indolent unreason to gain
the delusion of happiness? There is no such thing: but there's trance.
That talk of happiness is a carrion clamour of the creatures of prey.
Take it--and you're helping tear some poor wretch to pieces, whom you
might be constructing, saving perchance: some one? some thousands! You,
Beauchamp, when I met you first, you were for England, England! for a
breadth of the palm of my hand comparatively--the round of a copper
penny, no wider! And from that you jumped at a bound to the round of this
earth: you were for humanity. Ay, we sailed our planet among the icy
spheres, and were at blood-heat for its destiny, you and I! And now you
hover for a wind to catch you. So it is for a soul rejecting prayer. This
wind and that has it: the well-springs within are shut down fast! I
pardon my Jenny, my Harry Denham's girl. She is a woman, and has a brain
like a bell that rings all round to the tongue. It is her kingdom, of the
interdicted untraversed frontiers. But what cares she, or any woman, that
this Age of ours should lie like a carcase against