told with approval how the Royal hand had trembled in
committing itself to the form of signature to which its action is
limited. If there was money to be paid, there was a bugbear to be
slain for it; and a bugbear is as obnoxious to the repose of commercial
communities as rivals are to kings.

The cry for war was absolutely unanimous, and a supremely national cry,
Everard Romfrey said, for it excluded the cotton-spinners.

He smacked his hands, crowing at the vociferations of disgust of those
negrophiles and sweaters of Christians, whose isolated clamour amid the
popular uproar sounded of gagged mouths.

One of the half-stifled cotton-spinners, a notorious one, a spouter of
rank sedition and hater of aristocracy, a political poacher, managed to
make himself heard. He was tossed to the Press for morsel, and tossed
back to the people in strips. Everard had a sharp return of appetite in
reading the daily and weekly journals. They printed logic, they printed
sense; they abused the treasonable barking cur unmercifully. They
printed almost as much as he would have uttered, excepting the strong
salt of his similes, likening that rascal and his crew to the American
weed in our waters, to the rotting wild bees' nest in our trees, to the
worm in our ships' timbers, and to lamentable afflictions of the human
frame, and of sheep, oxen, honest hounds. Manchester was in eclipse. The
world of England discovered that the peace-party which opposed was the
actual cause of the war: never was indication clearer. But my business
is with Mr. Beauchamp, to know whom, and partly understand his conduct
in after-days, it will be as well to take a bird'seye glance at him
through the war.

'Now,' said Everard, 'we shall see what staff there is in that fellow
Nevil.'

He expected, as you may imagine, a true young Beauchamp-Romfrey to be
straining his collar like a leash-hound.

CHAPTER IV. A GLIMPSE OF NEVIL IN ACTION

The young gentleman to whom Everard Romfrey transferred his combative
spirit despatched a letter from the Dardanelles, requesting his uncle
not to ask him for a spark of enthusiasm. He despised our Moslem
allies, he said, and thought with pity of the miserable herds of men in
regiments marching across the steppes at the bidding of a despot that we
were helping to popularize. He certainly wrote in the tone of a jejune
politician; pardonable stuff to seniors entertaining similar opinions,
but most exasperating when it run