owned he could not quite comprehend? He said he liked a bone in his
mouth; and it was natural wisdom, though unappreciated by women. A bone
in a boy's mind for him to gnaw and worry, corrects the vagrancies and
promotes the healthy activities, whether there be marrow in it or not.
Supposing it furnishes only dramatic entertainment in that usually vacant
tenement, or powder-shell, it will be of service.

Nevil proposed to her that her next present should be the entire list of
his beloved Incomprehensible's published works, and she promised, and was
not sorry to keep her promise dangling at the skirts of memory, to drop
away in time. For that fire-and-smoke writer dedicated volumes to the
praise of a regicide. Nice reading for her dear boy! Some weeks after
Nevil was off again, she abused herself for her half-hearted love of him,
and would have given him anything--the last word in favour of the Country
versus the royal Martyr, for example, had he insisted on it. She
gathered, bit by bit, that he had dashed at his big blustering cousin
Cecil to vindicate her good name. The direful youths fought in the
Steynham stables, overheard by the grooms. Everard received a fine
account of the tussle from these latter, and Rosamund, knowing him to be
of the order of gentlemen who, whatsoever their sins, will at all costs
protect a woman's delicacy, and a dependant's, man or woman, did not fear
to have her ears shocked in probing him on the subject.

Everard was led to say that Nevil's cousins were bedevilled with
womanfolk.

From which Rosamund perceived that women had been at work; and if so, it
was upon the business of the scandal-monger; and if so, Nevil fought his
cousin to protect her good name from a babbler of the family gossip.