Lord Evelyn was silent.

“Besides, there is more than that,” his friend continued, warmly.  “You may call it selfishness, if you like, but if you love a woman and she gives her life into your hands—­well, she has the first claim on you.  I will put it to you:  do you think I am going to sell the Beeches—­when—­when she might live there?”

Lord Evelyn did not answer.

“Of course I am willing to subscribe largely,” his friend continued; “and Natalie herself would say yes to that.  But I am not ambitious.  I don’t want to enter that grade.  I don’t want to sit in Lind’s chair when he gets elected to the Council, as has been suggested to me.  I am not qualified for it; I don’t care about it; I can best do my own work in my own way.”

At last Lord Evelyn spoke; but it was in a meditative fashion, and not very much to the point.  He lay back in his easy-chair, his hands clasped behind his head, and talked; and his talk was not at all about the selling of Hill Beeches in Buckinghamshire, but of much more abstract matters.  He spoke of the divine wrath of the reformer—­what a curious thing it was, that fiery impatience with what was wrong in the world; how it cropped up here and there from time to time; and how one abuse after another had been burnt up by it and swept away forever.  Give the man possessed of this holy rage all the beauty and wealth and ease in the world, and he is not satisfied; there is something within him that vibrates to the call of humanity without; others can pass by what does not affect themselves with a laugh or a shrug of indifference; he only must stay and labor till the wrong thing is put right.  And how often had he been jeered at by the vulgar of his time; how Common-Sense had pointed the finger of scorn at him; how Respectability had called him crazed!  John Brown at Harper’s Ferry is only a ridiculous old fool; his effort is absurd; even gentlemen in the North feel an “intellectual satisfaction” that he is hanged, because of his “preposterous miscalculation of possibilities.”  Yes, no doubt; you hang him, and there is an end; but “his soul goes marching on,” and the slaves are freed!  You want to abolish the Corn-laws?—­all good society shrieks at you at first:  you are a Radical, a regicide, a Judas Iscariot; but in time the nation listens, and the poor have cheap bread.  “Mazzini is mad!” the world cries:  “why this useless bloodshed?  It is only political murder.”  Mazzini is mad, no doubt:  but in time the beautiful dream of Italy—­of “Italia, the world’s wonder, the world’s care”—­comes true.  And what matter to the reformer, the agitator, the dreamer, though you stone him to death, or throw him to the lions, or clap him into a nineteenth-century prison and shut his mouth that way?  He has handed on the sacred fire.  Others will bear the torch; and he who is unencumbered will outstrip his fellows.  The wrong must be put right.

And so forth, and so forth.  Brand sat and listened, recognizing here and there a proud, pathetic phrase of Natalie’s, and knowing well whence the inspiration came; and as he listened he almost felt as though that beautiful old place in Buckinghamshire was slipping through his fingers.  The sacrifice seemed to be becoming less and less of a sacrifice; it took more and more the form of a duty; would Natalie’s eyes smile approval?