The weighty and the trivial contended; no fitting message could be thought of. “You are unused to real suffering—that is for women!—and want to be doing instead of enduring,” said Rosamund. She was beginning to put faith in the innocence of these two mortally sick lovers. Beauchamp’s outcries against himself gave her the shadows of their story. He stood in tears—a thing to see to believe of Nevil Beauchamp; and plainly he did not know it, or else he would have taken her advice to him to leave the house at an hour that was long past midnight. Her method for inducing him to go was based on her intimate knowledge of him: she made as if to soothe and kiss him compassionately. In the morning there was a flying word from Roland, on his way to England. Rosamund tempered her report of Renée by saying of her, that she was very quiet. He turned to the window. “Look, what a climate ours is!” Beauchamp abused the persistent fog. “Dull, cold, no sky, a horrible air to breathe! This is what she has come to! Has she spoken of me yet?” “No.” “Is she dead silent?” “She answers, if I speak to her.” “I believe, ma’am,” said Beauchamp, “that we are the coldest-hearted people in Europe.” Rosamund did not defend us, or the fog. Consequently nothing was left for him to abuse but himself. In that she tried to moderate him, and drew forth a torrent of self-vituperation, after which he sank into the speechless misery he had been evading; until sophistical fancy, another evolution of his nature, persuaded him that Roland, seeing Renée, would for love’s sake be friendly to them. “I should have told you, Nevil, by the way, that the earl is dead,” said Rosamund. “Her brother will be here to-day; he can’t be later than the evening,” said Beauchamp. “Get her to eat, ma’am; you must. Command her to eat. This terrible starvation!” “You ate nothing yourself, Nevil, all day yesterday.”