 prompted him to
conceive his honourable duty, without a single intimation that he loathed the
task, neither shrug nor grimace.
    »Two ends of a stick are pretty much alike: they 're all that length apart,«
said he, very little in the humour for compliments, however well braced for his
work.
    His wife's admiring love was pleasant enough. He preferred to have it
unspoken. Few of us care to be eulogized in the act of taking a nauseous medical
mixture.
    For him the thing was as good as done, on his deciding to think it both
adviseable and right: so he shouldered his load and marched off with it. He
could have postponed the right proceeding, even after the partial recognition of
his error: - one drops a word or two by hazard, one expresses an anxiety to
afford reparation, one sends a message, and so forth, for the satisfaction of
one's conventionally gentlemanly feeling: - but the adviseable proceeding under
stress of peculiar circumstances, his clearly-awakened recognition of that,
impelled him unhesitatingly. His wife had said it was the portion she brought
him. Tears would not have persuaded him so powerfully, that he might prove to
her he was glad of her whatever the portion she brought. She was a good wife, a
brave woman, likely to be an incomparable mother. At present her very virtues
excited her to fancifulness: nevertheless she was in his charge, and he was
bound to break the neck of his will, to give her perfect peace of mind. The
child suffers from the mother's mental agitation. It might be a question of a
nervous or an idiot future Earl of Romfrey. Better death to the House than such
a mockery of his line! These reflections reminded him of the heartiness of his
whipping of that poor old tumbled signpost Shrapnel, in the name of outraged
womankind. If there was no outrage?
    Assuredly if there was no outrage, consideration for the state of his wife
would urge him to speak the apology in the most natural manner possible. She
vowed there was none.
    He never thought of blaming her for formerly deceiving him, nor of blaming
her for now expediting him.
    In the presence of Colonel Halkett, Mr. Tuckham, and Mr. Lydiard, on a fine
November afternoon, standing bareheaded in the fir-bordered garden of the
cottage on the common, Lord Romfrey delivered his apology to Dr. Shrapnel, and
he said:
    »I call you to witness, gentlemen, I offer Dr. Shrapnel the fullest
reparation he may think fit to demand of me for an
