hining spiritually bright,'
said Jenny, and cut her husband adrift with the exclamation, and saw him
float away to Dr. Shrapnel.

'Spiritually bright!'

'By comparison, Nevil.'

'There's neither spiritual nor political brightness in England, but a
common resolution to eat of good things and stick to them,' said the
doctor: 'and we two out of England, there's barely a voice to cry scare
to the feeders. I'm back! I'm home!'

They lost him once in Cadiz, and discovered him on the quay, looking
about for a vessel. In getting him to return to the Esperanza, they
nearly all three fell into the hands of the police. Beauchamp gave him
a great deal of his time, reading and discussing with him on deck and
in the cabin, and projecting future enterprises, to pacify his
restlessness. A translation of Plato had become Beauchamp's intellectual
world. This philosopher singularly anticipated his ideas. Concerning
himself he was beginning to think that he had many years ahead of him
for work. He was with Dr. Shrapnel, as to the battle, and with Jenny as
to the delay in recommencing it. Both the men laughed at the constant
employment she gave them among the Greek islands in furnishing her
severely accurate accounts of sea-fights and land-fights: and the
scenes being before them they could neither of them protest that their
task-work was an idle labour. Dr. Shrapnel assisted in fighting Marathon
and Salamis over again cordially--to shield Great Britain from the rule
of a satrapy.

Beauchamp often tried to conjure words to paint his wife. On grave
subjects she had the manner of speaking of a shy scholar, and between
grave and playful, between smiling and serious, her clear head, her
nobly poised character, seemed to him to have never had a prototype and
to elude the art of picturing it in expression, until he heard Lydiard
call her whimsically, 'Portia disrobing.'

Portia half in her doctor's gown, half out of it. They met Lydiard and
his wife Louise, and Mr. and Mrs. Tuckham, in Venice, where, upon the
first day of October, Jenny Beauchamp gave birth to a son. The thrilling
mother did not perceive on this occasion the gloom she cast over the
father of the child and Dr. Shrapnel. The youngster would insist on his
right to be sprinkled by the parson, to get a legal name and please his
mother. At all turns in the history of our healthy relations with
women we are confronted by the parson! 'And, upon my word, I believe,'
Beauchamp said