‘Oh, certainly,’ said Nevil.

‘Will you take a whip down there?’

‘If you’re all insured.’

’On my honour, old Nevil, driving a four-in-hand is easier than governing the country.’

‘I’ll accept your authority for what you know best,’ said Nevil.

The toast of the Drive into Bevisham was drunk.

Cecilia left the supper-table, mortified, and feeling disgraced by her participation in a secret that was being wantonly abused to humiliate Nevil, as she was made to think by her sensitiveness.  All the gentlemen were against him, excepting perhaps that chattering pie Lord Palmet, who did him more mischief than his enemies.  She could not sleep.  She walked out on the terrace with Mrs. Wardour-Devereux, in a dream, hearing that lady breathe remarks hardly less than sentimental, and an unwearied succession of shouts from the smoking-room.

‘They are not going to bed to-night,’ said Mrs. Devereux.

‘They are mystifying Captain Beauchamp,’ said Cecilia.

’My husband tells me they are going to drive him into the town to-morrow.’

Cecilia flushed:  she could scarcely get her breath.

‘Is that their plot?’ she murmured.

Sleep was rejected by her, bed itself.  The drive into Bevisham had been fixed for nine A.M.  She wrote two lines on note-paper in her room:  but found them overfervid and mysterious.  Besides, how were they to be conveyed to Nevil’s chamber

She walked in the passage for half an hour, thinking it possible she might meet him; not the most lady-like of proceedings, but her head was bewildered.  An arm-chair in her room invited her to rest and think—­the mask of a natural desire for sleep.  At eight in the morning she was awakened by her maid, and at a touch exclaimed, ‘Have they gone?’ and her heart still throbbed after hearing that most of the gentlemen were in and about the stables.  Cecilia was down-stairs at a quarter to nine.  The breakfast-room was empty of all but Lord Palmet and Mr. Wardour-Devereux; one selecting a cigar to light out of doors, the other debating between two pipes.  She beckoned to Palmet, and commissioned him to inform Beauchamp that she wished him to drive her down to Bevisham in her pony-carriage.  Palmet brought back word from Beauchamp that he had an appointment at ten o’clock in the town.  ‘I want to see him,’ she said; so Palmet ran out with the order.  Cecilia met Beauchamp in the entrance-hall.

‘You must not go,’ she said bluntly.

‘I can’t break an appointment,’ said he—­’for the sake of my own pleasure,’ was implied.

‘Will you not listen to me, Nevil, when I say you cannot go?’

A coachman’s trumpet blew.

’I shall be late.  That’s Colonel Millington’s team.  He starts first, then Wardour-Devereux, then Cecil, and I mount beside him; Palmet’s at our heels.’

’But can’t you even imagine a purpose for their driving into Bevisham so pompously?’