is a part . . . ?'

He put his legal right in force to shut her mouth, telling her presently
she might Lydiardize as much as she liked. While practising this mastery,
he assured her he would always listen to her: yes, whether she
Lydiardized, or what Dr. Shrapnel called Jenny-prated.

'That is to say, dear Nevil, that you have quite made up your mind to a
toddling chattering little nursery wife?'

Very much the contrary to anything of the sort, he declared; and he
proved his honesty by announcing an immediate reflection that had come to
him: 'How oddly things are settled! Cecilia Halkett and Tuckham; you and
I! Now, I know for certain that I have brought Cecilia Halkett out of her
woman's Toryism, and given her at least liberal views, and she goes and
marries an arrant Tory; while you, a bit of a Tory at heart, more than
anything else, have married an ultra.'

'Perhaps we may hope that the conflict will be seasonable on both
sides?--if you give me fair play, Nevil!'

As fair play as a woman's lord could give her, she was to have; with
which, adieu to argumentation and controversy, and all the thanks in life
to the parson! On a lovely island, free from the seductions of care,
possessing a wife who, instead of starting out of romance and poetry with
him to the supreme honeymoon, led him back to those forsaken valleys of
his youth, and taught him the joys of colour and sweet companionship,
simple delights, a sister mind, with a loveliness of person and nature
unimagined by him, Beauchamp drank of a happiness that neither Renee nor
Cecilia had promised. His wooing of Jenny Beauchamp was a flattery richer
than any the maiden Jenny Denham could have deemed her due; and if his
wonder in experiencing such strange gladness was quaintly ingenuous, it
was delicious to her to see and know full surely that he who was at
little pains to court, or please, independently of the agency of the
truth in him, had come to be her lover through being her husband.

Here I would stop. It is Beauchamp's career that carries me on to its
close, where the lanterns throw their beams off the mudbanks by the black
riverside; when some few English men and women differed from the world in
thinking that it had suffered a loss.

They sorrowed for the earl when tidings came to them of the loss of his
child, alive one hour in his arms. Rosamund caused them to be deceived as
to her condition. She survived; she wrote to Jenny, bidding her keep her
husb