She was on her way to dress for church.  He drew her into the library, and there threw open a vast placard lying on the table.  It was printed in blue characters and red.  ’This is what I got by the post this morning.  I suppose Nevil knows about it.  He wants tickling, but I don’t like this kind of thing.  It ’s not fair war.  It ’s as bad as using explosive bullets in my old game.’

‘Can he expect his adversaries to be tender with him?’ Cecilia simulated vehemence in an underbreath.  She glanced down the page: 

‘French marquees’ caught her eye.

It was a page of verse.  And, oh! could it have issued from a Tory Committee?

‘The Liberals are as bad, and worse,’ her father said.

She became more and more distressed.  ’It seems so very mean, papa; so base.  Ungenerous is no word for it.  And how vulgar!  Now I remember, Nevil said he wished to see Mr. Austin.’

‘Seymour Austin would not sanction it.’

‘No, but Nevil might hold him responsible for it.’

’I suspect Mr. Stukely Culbrett, whom he quotes, and that smoking-room lot at Lespel’s.  I distinctly discountenance it.  So I shall tell them on Wednesday night.  Can you keep a secret?’

’And after all Nevil Beauchamp is very young, papa!—­of course I can keep a secret.’

The colonel exacted no word of honour, feeling quite sure of her.

He whispered the secret in six words, and her cheeks glowed vermilion.

‘But they will meet on Wednesday after this,’ she said, and her sight went dancing down the column of verse, of which the following trotting couplet is a specimen:—­

    ’O did you ever, hot in love, a little British middy see,
     Like Orpheus asking what the deuce to do without Eurydice?’

The middy is jilted by his French marquees, whom he ‘did adore,’ and in his wrath he recommends himself to the wealthy widow Bevisham, concerning whose choice of her suitors there is a doubt:  but the middy is encouraged to persevere: 

     ’Up, up, my pretty middy; take a draught of foaming Sillery;
     Go in and win the uriddy with your Radical artillery.’

And if Sillery will not do, he is advised, he being for superlatives, to try the sparkling Sillery of the Radical vintage, selected grapes.

This was but impudent nonsense.  But the reiterated apostrophe to ‘my French marquees’ was considered by Cecilia to be a brutal offence.

She was shocked that her party should have been guilty of it.  Nevil certainly provoked, and he required, hard blows; and his uncle Everard might be right in telling her father that they were the best means of teaching him to come to his understanding.  Still a foul and stupid squib did appear to her a debasing weapon to use.

‘I cannot congratulate you on your choice of a second candidate, papa,’ she said scornfully.