 learn to behave himself like a gentleman at
Steynham.«
    »He has not failed.«
    »I 'll say, then, behave himself, simply. He considers it a point of honour
to get his uncle Everard to go down on his knees to Shrapnel. But he has no
moral sense where I should like to see it: none: he confessed it.«
    »What were his words, papa?«
    »I don't remember words. He runs over to France, whenever it suits him, to
carry on there ...« The colonel ended in a hum and buzz.
    »Has he been to France lately?« asked Cecilia.
    Her breath hung for the answer, sedately though she sat.
    »The woman's father is dead, I hear,« Colonel Halkett remarked.
    »But he has not been there?«
    »How can I tell? He 's anywhere, wherever his passions whisk him.«
    »No!«
    »I say, yes. And if he has money, we shall see him going sky-high and
scattering it in sparks, not merely spending; I mean living immorally,
infidelizing, republicanizing, scandalizing his class and his country.«
    »Oh no!« exclaimed Cecilia, rising and moving to the window to feast her
eyes on driving clouds, in a strange exaltation of mind, secretly sure now that
her idea of Nevil's having gone over to France was groundless, and feeling that
she had been unworthy of him who strove to be »worthier of her, as he hoped to
become.«
    Colonel Halkett scoffed at her »Oh no,« and called it woman's logic.
    She could not restrain herself. »Have you forgotten Mr. Austin, papa? It is
Nevil's perfect truthfulness that makes him appear worse to you than men who are
time-servers. Too many time-servers rot the State, Mr. Austin said. Nevil is not
one of them. I am not able to judge or speculate whether he has a great brain or
is likely to distinguish himself out of his profession: I would rather he did
not abandon it: but Mr. Austin said to me in talking of him ...«
    »That notion of Austin's of screwing women's minds up to the pitch of
men's!« interjected the colonel with a despairing flap of his arm.
    »He said, papa, that honestly active men in a country, who decline to
practise hypocrisy, show that the blood runs, and are a sign of
