h cruel black
mail upon the mind; that a gust of wind, a horse's plunge, the effluvia
of a sewer, the carelessness of a pointsman, can destroy the grandest
intellect, sweep off the men whose genius lights the world, as
ruthlessly as a storm of rain a cloud of gnats, and strike Peel and
Canning, Macaulay and Donaldson, in the prime of their power, as
heedlessly as peasants little higher than the brutes, dull as the clods
of their own valley, who stake their ambitions on a surfeit of fat
bacon, and can barely scrawl their names upon a slate!

Unconscious that Earlscourt's jealousy had fastened so wrongly upon me,
I was calling upon Beatrice late the next morning, ignorant myself of
his illness, when his physician, who was Lady Mechlin's too, while
paying her a complimentary visit, regretted to me my cousin's sudden
attack.

"Lord Earlscourt would speak last night," he began. "I entreated him
not; but those public men are so obstinate; to-day he is very ill--very
ill indeed, though prompt measures stopped the worst. He has risen to
dictate something of importance to his secretary; he would work his
brain if he were dying; but it has taken a severe hold on him, I fear. I
shall send him somewhere south as soon as he can leave the house, which
will not be for some weeks. He would be a great loss to the country. We
have not such another foreign minister. But I admit to you, Major
Hervey--though of course I do not wish it to go further--that I _do_
think very seriously of Lord Earlscourt's state of health."

Beatrice heard him as she sat at her Davenport; her face grew white, and
her eyes filled with great anguish. She thought of his words to her only
the day before, and of how her pride had repelled him a second time. I
saw her hand clinch on the pen she was playing with, and her teeth set
tight together, her habitual action under any strong emotion, thinking
to herself, no doubt, "And my last words to him were bitter ones!"

When the physician had left, I went up to her.--

"Beatrice, you must let me tell him _now_!"

She did not answer, but her hand clinched tighter on the pen-handle.

"His life is in your hands; for God's sake relinquish your pride."

But her pride was strong in her, and dear to her still, strong and dear
as her love; and the two struggled together. Earlscourt had bowed _his_
pride to her; but she had not yielded up her own, and it cost her much
to yield it even now. All the Pythoness in her was not