‘So you have been thinking over it?’ he asked.

‘Not to conclusions,’ she said, trying to retain in her mind the evanescent suggestiveness of his previous remark, and vexed to find herself upon nothing but a devious phosphorescent trail there.

Her forehead betrayed the unwonted mental action.  He cried out for pardon.  ’What right have I to bother you?  I see it annoys you.  The truth is, I came for peace.  I think of you when they talk of English homes.’

She felt then that he was comparing her home with another, a foreign home.  After he had gone she felt that there had been a comparison of two persons.  She remembered one of his observations:  ’Few women seem to have courage’; when his look at her was for an instant one of scrutiny or calculation.  Under a look like that we perceive that we are being weighed.  She had no clue to tell her what it signified.

Glorious and solely glorious love, that has risen above emotion, quite independent of craving!  That is to be the bird of upper air, poised on his wings.  It is a home in the sky.  Cecilia took possession of it systematically, not questioning whether it would last; like one who is too enamoured of the habitation to object to be a tenant-at-will.  If it was cold, it was in recompense immeasurably lofty, a star-girdled place; and dwelling in it she could avow to herself the secret which was now working self-deception, and still preserve her pride unwounded.  Her womanly pride, she would have said in vindication of it:  but Cecilia Halkett’s pride went far beyond the merely womanly.

Thus she was assisted to endure a journey down to Wales, where Nevil would surely not be.  She passed a Winter without seeing him.  She returned to Mount Laurels from London at Easter, and went on a visit to Steynham, and back to London, having sight of him nowhere, still firm in the thought that she loved ethereally, to bless, forgive, direct, encourage, pray for him, impersonally.  She read certain speeches delivered by Nevil at assemblies of Liberals or Radicals, which were reported in papers in the easy irony of the style of here and there a sentence, here and there a summary:  salient quotations interspersed with running abstracts:  a style terrible to friends of the speaker so reported, overwhelming if they differ in opinion:  yet her charity was a match for it.  She was obliged to have recourse to charity, it should be observed.  Her father drew her attention to the spectacle of R. C. S. Nevil Beauchamp, Commander R.N., fighting those reporters with letters in the newspapers, and the dry editorial comment flanked by three stars on the left.  He was shocked to see a gentleman writing such letters to the papers.  ‘But one thing hangs on another,’ said he.

‘But you seem angry with Nevil, papa,’ said she.

‘I do hate a turbulent, restless fellow, my dear,’ the colonel burst out.

‘Papa, he has really been unfairly reported.’