
    Up sprang the marquis with an entreating, »Mademoiselle!«
    »M. Beauchamp will entertain you, M. le marquis.«
    »I want him here,« said the count; and Beauchamp showed that his wish was to
enter the count's gondola, but Renée had recovered her aplomb, and decisively
said »No,« and Beauchamp had to yield.
    That would have been an opportunity of speaking to her father without a
formal asking of leave. She knew it as well as Nevil Beauchamp.
    Renée took his hand to be assisted in the step down to her father's arms,
murmuring:
    »Do nothing - nothing! until you hear from me.«
 

                                   Chapter XI

                               Captain Baskelett

Our England, meanwhile, was bustling over the extinguished war, counting the
cost of it, with a rather rueful eye on Manchester, and soothing the taxed by an
exhibition of heroes at brilliant feasts. Of course, the first to come home had
the cream of the praises. She hugged them in a manner somewhat suffocating to
modest men, but heroism must be brought to bear upon these excesses of maternal
admiration; modesty, too, when it accepts the place of honour at a public
banquet, should not protest overmuch. To be just, the earliest arrivals, which
were such as reached the shores of Albion before her war was at an end, did
cordially reciprocate the hug. They were taught, and they believed most
naturally, that it was quite as well to repose upon her bosom as to have stuck
to their posts. Surely there was a conscious weakness in the Spartans, who were
always at pains to discipline their men in heroical conduct, and rewarded none
save the stand-fasts. A system of that sort seems to betray the sense of poverty
in the article. Our England does nothing like it. All are welcome home to her so
long as she is in want of them. Besides, she has to please the taxpayer. You may
track a shadowy line or crazy zigzag of policy in almost every stroke of her
domestic history: either it is the forethought finding it necessary to stir up
an impulse, or else dashing impulse gives a lively pull to the afterthought:
policy becomes evident somehow, clumsily very possibly. How can she manage an
enormous middle-class, to keep it happy, other than a little clumsily? The
managing of it at all is the wonder. And not only has she to stupefy the
taxpayer by a timely display of feastings and fireworks, she has to stop all
that nonsense (to quote a satiated man lightened in his purse) at
