can choose for him. In a ship's
cabin he is thrown away. Ay, ay, War, and he may go aboard. But now we
must have him ashore. Too few of such as he!'

'It is matter of opinion,' said Rosamund, very tightly compressed;
scarcely knowing what she said.

How strange, besides hateful, it was to her to hear her darling spoken
of by a stranger who not only pretended to appreciate but to possess
him! A stranger, a man of evil, with monstrous ideas! A terribly strong
inexhaustible man, of a magical power too; or would he otherwise have
won such a mastery over Nevil?

Of course she could have shot a rejoinder, to confute him with all the
force of her indignation, save that the words were tumbling about in her
head like a world in disruption, which made her feel a weakness at
the same time that she gloated on her capacity, as though she had an
enormous army, quite overwhelming if it could but be got to move in
advance. This very common condition of the silent-stricken, unused in
dialectics, heightened Rosamund's disgust by causing her to suppose that
Nevil had been similarly silenced, in his case vanquished, captured,
ruined; and he dwindled in her estimation for a moment or two. She felt
that among a sisterhood of gossips she would soon have found her voice,
and struck down the demagogue's audacious sophisms: not that they
affected her in the slightest degree for her own sake.

Shrapnel might think what he liked, and say what he liked, as far as she
was concerned, apart from the man she loved. Rosamund went through these
emotions altogether on Nevil's behalf, and longed for her affirmatizing
inspiring sisterhood until the thought of them threw another shade on
him.

What champion was she to look to? To whom but to Mr. Everard Romfrey?

It was with a spasm of delighted reflection that she hit on Mr. Romfrey.
He was like a discovery to her. With his strength and skill, his robust
common sense and rough shrewd wit, his prompt comparisons, his chivalry,
his love of combat, his old knightly blood, was not he a match, and an
overmatch, for the ramping Radical who had tangled Nevil in his rough
snares? She ran her mind over Mr. Romfrey's virtues, down even to his
towering height and breadth. Could she but once draw these two giants
into collision in Nevil's presence, she was sure it would save him. The
method of doing it she did not stop to consider: she enjoyed her triumph
in the idea.

Meantime she had passed from Dr. Shrapnel