larm her.

Under her air of calm abstraction she watched him rigorously for some
sign of his ownership that should tempt her to revolt from her pledge, or
at least dream of breaking loose: the dream would have sufficed. He was
never intrusive, never pressing. He did not vex, because he absolutely
trusted to the noble loyalty which made her admit to herself that she
belonged irrevocably to him, while her thoughts were upon Beauchamp. With
a respectful gravity he submitted to her perusal a collection of
treatises on diet, classed pro and con., and paged and pencil-marked to
simplify her study of the question. They sketched in company; she played
music to him, he read poetry to her, and read it well. He seemed to feel
the beauty of it sensitively, as she did critically. In other days the
positions had been reversed. He invariably talked of Beauchamp with
kindness, deploring only that he should be squandering his money on
workmen's halls and other hazy projects down in Bevisham.

'Lydiard tells me he has a very sound idea of the value of money, and has
actually made money by cattle breeding; but he has flung ten thousand
pounds on a single building outside the town, and he'll have to endow it
to support it--a Club to educate Radicals. The fact is, he wants to jam
the business of two or three centuries into a life-time. These men of
their so-called progress are like the majority of religious minds: they
can't believe without seeing and touching. That is to say, they don't
believe in the abstract at all, but they go to work blindly by agitating,
and proselytizing, and persecuting to get together a mass they can
believe in. You see it in their way of arguing; it's half done with the
fist. Lydiard tells me he left him last in a horrible despondency about
progress. Ha! ha! Beauchamp's no Radical. He hasn't forgiven the Countess
of Romfrey for marrying above her rank. He may be a bit of a Republican:
but really in this country Republicans are fighting with the shadow of an
old hat and a cockhorse. I beg to state that I have a reverence for
constituted authority: I speak of what those fellows are contending
with.'

'Right,' said Colonel Halkett. 'But "the shadow of an old hat and a
cockhorse": what does that mean?'

'That's what our Republicans are hitting at, sir.'

'Ah! so; yes,' quoth the colonel. 'And I say this to Nevil Beauchamp,
that what we've grown up well with, powerfully with, it's base
ingratitude and dangerous fo