‘Indeed!’ was all that Walpole could utter. ‘Just take it to your room and read it over. You will be astonished at the thing. The fellow has got to know the bearings of a whole set of new questions, and how he understands the men he has got to deal with!’ ‘With your leave I will do so,’ said he, as he took the letter and left the room. CHAPTER LX A DEFEAT Cecil Walpole’s Italian experiences had supplied him with an Italian proverb which says, ‘_Tutto il mal non vien per nuocere_,’ or, in other words, that no evil comes unmixed with good; and there is a marvellous amount of wisdom in the adage. That there is a deep philosophy, too, in showing how carefully we should sift misfortune to the dregs, and ascertain what of benefit we might rescue from the dross, is not to be denied; and the more we reflect on it, the more should we see that the germ of all real consolation is intimately bound up in this reservation. No sooner, then, did Walpole, in novelist phrase, ‘realise the fact’ that he was to go to Guatemala, than he set very practically to inquire what advantages, if any, could be squeezed out of this unpromising incident. The creditors--and he had some--would not like it! The dreary process of dunning a man across half the globe, the hopelessness of appeals that took two months to come to hand, and the inefficacy of threats that were wafted over miles of ocean! And certainly he smiled as he thought of these, and rather maliciously bethought him of the truculent importunity that menaced him with some form of publicity in the more insolent appeal to some Minister at home. ‘Our tailor will moderate his language, our jeweller will appreciate the merits of polite letter-writing,’ thought he. ‘A few parallels of latitude become a great school-master.’ But there were greater advantages even than these. This banishment--for it was nothing else--could not by any possibility be persisted in, and if Lady Maude should consent to accompany him, would be very short-lived. ‘The women will take it up,’ said he, ‘and with that charming clanship that distinguishes them, will lead the Foreign Secretary a life of misery till he gives us something better.--“Maude says the thermometer has never been lower than 132°, and that there is no shade. The nights have no breeze, and are rather hotter than the days. She objects seriously to be waited on by people in feathers, and very few of them, and she remonstrates against alligators in the kitchen-garden, and wild cats coming after the canaries in the drawing-room.”