n't tear me to strips to have him in spite of it?'

'No, papa, not I. I will not.'

'Well, that's something for me to hold fast to,' said Colonel Halkett,
sighing.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

LORD AVONLEY

Mr. Everard Romfrey was now, by consent, Lord Avonley, mounted on his
direct heirship and riding hard at the earldom. His elevation occurred at
a period of life that would have been a season of decay with most men;
but the prolonged and lusty Autumn of the veteran took new fires from a
tangible object to live for. His brother Craven's death had slightly
stupefied, and it had grieved him: it seemed to him peculiarly pathetic;
for as he never calculated on the happening of mortal accidents to men of
sound constitution, the circumstance imparted a curious shake to his own
solidity. It was like the quaking of earth, which tries the balance of
the strongest. If he had not been raised to so splendid a survey of the
actual world, he might have been led to think of the imaginary, where
perchance a man may meet his old dogs and a few other favourites, in a
dim perpetual twilight. Thither at all events Craven had gone, and
goodnight to him! The earl was a rapidly lapsing invalid. There could be
no doubt that Everard was to be the head of his House.

Outwardly he was the same tolerant gentleman who put aside the poor fools
of the world to walk undisturbed by them in the paths he had chosen: in
this aspect he knew himself: nor was the change so great within him as to
make him cognizant of a change. It was only a secret turn in the bent of
the mind, imperceptible as the touch of the cunning artist's brush on a
finished portrait, which will alter the expression without discomposing a
feature, so that you cannot say it is another face, yet it is not the
former one. His habits were invariable, as were his meditations. He
thought less of Romfrey Castle than of his dogs and his devices for
trapping vermin; his interest in birds and beasts and herbs, 'what
ninnies call Nature in books,' to quote him, was undiminished;
imagination he had none to clap wings to his head and be off with it. He
betrayed as little as he felt that the coming Earl of Romfrey was
different from the cadet of the family.

A novel sharpness in the 'Stop that,' with which he crushed Beauchamp's
affectedly gentle and unusually roundabout opening of the vexed Shrapnel
question, rang like a shot in the room at Steynham, and breathed a
different spirit from his cust