‘He says he must have it.’

‘Who is to stand and deliver, then?’

’I don’t know; I only repeat what he says:  unless he has an eye on my Aunt Beauchamp; and I doubt his luck there, if he wants money for political campaigning.’

‘Money!’ Colonel Halkett ejaculated.

That word too was in the heart of the heiress.

Nevil must have money!  Could he have said it?  Ordinary men might say or think it inoffensively; Captain Baskelett, for instance:  but not Nevil Beauchamp.

Captain Baskelett, as she had conveyed the information to her father for his comfort in the dumb domestic language familiar between them on these occasions, had proposed to her unavailingly.  Italian and English gentlemen were in the list of her rejected suitors:  and hitherto she had seen them come and go, one might say, from a watchtower in the skies.  None of them was the ideal she waited for:  what their feelings were, their wishes, their aims, she had not reflected on.  They dotted the landscape beneath the unassailable heights, busy after their fashion, somewhat quaint, much like the pigmy husbandmen in the fields were to the giant’s daughter, who had more curiosity than Cecilia.  But Nevil Beauchamp had compelled her to quit her lofty station, pulled her low as the littlest of women that throb and flush at one man’s footstep:  and being well able to read the nature and aspirations of Captain Baskelett, it was with the knowledge of her having been proposed to as heiress of a great fortune that she chanced to hear of Nevil’s resolve to have money.  If he did say it!  And was anything likelier? was anything unlikelier?  His foreign love denied to him, why, now he devoted himself to money:  money—­the last consideration of a man so single-mindedly generous as he!  But he must have money to pursue his contest!  But would he forfeit the truth in him for money for any purpose?

The debate on this question grew as incessant as the thought of him.  Was it not to be supposed that the madness of the pursuit of his political chimaera might change his character?

She hoped he would not come to Mount Laurels, thinking she should esteem him less if he did; knowing that her defence of him, on her own behalf, against herself, depended now on an esteem lodged perhaps in her wilfulness.  Yet if he did not come, what an Arctic world!

He came on a November afternoon when the woods glowed, and no sun.  The day was narrowed in mist from earth to heaven:  a moveless and possessing mist.  It left space overhead for one wreath of high cloud mixed with touches of washed red upon moist blue, still as the mist, insensibly passing into it.  Wet webs crossed the grass, chill in the feeble light.  The last flowers of the garden bowed to decay.  Dead leaves, red and brown and spotted yellow, fell straight around the stems of trees, lying thick.  The glow was universal, and the chill.

Cecilia sat sketching the scene at a window of her study, on the level of the drawing-room, and he stood by outside till she saw him.  He greeted her through the glass, then went round to the hall door, giving her time to recover, if only her heart had been less shaken.