Next day her father tossed her a photograph of another gentleman, coming
out of a letter he had received from old Mrs. Beauchamp. He asked her
opinion of it. She said, 'I think he would have suited Bevisham better
than Captain Baskelett.' Of the original, who presented himself at Mount
Laurels in the course of the week, she had nothing to say, except that he
was very like the photograph, very unlike Nevil Beauchamp. 'Yes, there
I'm of your opinion,' her father observed. The gentleman was Mr.
Blackburn Tuckham, and it was amusing to find an exuberant Tory in one
who was the reverse of the cavalier type. Nevil and he seemed to have
been sorted to the wrong sides. Mr. Tuckham had a round head, square
flat forehead, and ruddy face; he stood as if his feet claimed the earth
under them for his own, with a certain shortness of leg that detracted
from the majesty of his resemblance to our Eighth Harry, but increased
his air of solidity; and he was authoritative in speaking. 'Let me set
you right, sir,' he said sometimes to Colonel Halkett, and that was his
modesty. 'You are altogether wrong,' Miss Halkett heard herself
informed, which was his courtesy. He examined some of her water-colour
drawings before sitting down to dinner, approved of them, but thought it
necessary to lay a broad finger on them to show their defects. On the
question of politics, 'I venture to state,' he remarked, in anything but
the tone of a venture, 'that no educated man of ordinary sense who has
visited our colonies will come back a Liberal.' As for a man of sense
and education being a Radical, he scouted the notion with a pooh
sufficient to awaken a vessel in the doldrums. He said carelessly of
Commander Beauchamp, that he might think himself one. Either the Radical
candidate for Bevisham stood self-deceived, or--the other supposition.
Mr. Tuckham would venture to state that no English gentleman, exempt from
an examination by order of the Commissioners of Lunacy, could be
sincerely a Radical. 'Not a bit of it; nonsense,' he replied to Miss
Halkett's hint at the existence of Radical views; 'that is, those views