’But if you allow yourself to be so prejudiced against my best friend that you will not hear a word of his writing, are you friendly?’

‘Feminine, and obstinate,’ said Cecilia.

’Give me your eyes an instant.  I know you think me reckless and lawless:  now is not that true?  You doubt whether, if a lady gave me her hand I should hold to it in perfect faith.  Or, perhaps not that:  but you do suspect I should be capable of every sophism under the sun to persuade a woman to break her faith, if it suited me:  supposing some passion to be at work.  Men who are open to passion have to be taught reflection before they distinguish between the woman they should sue for love because she would be their best mate, and the woman who has thrown a spell on them.  Now, what I beg you to let me read you in this letter is a truth nobly stated that has gone into my blood, and changed me.  It cannot fail, too, in changeing your opinion of Dr. Shrapnel.  It makes me wretched that you should be divided from me in your ideas of him.  I, you see—­and I confess I think it my chief title to honour—­reverence him.’

‘I regret that I am unable to utter the words of Ruth,’ said Cecilia, in a low voice.  She felt rather tremulously; opposed only to the letter and the writer of it, not at all to Beauchamp, except on account of his idolatry of the wicked revolutionist.  Far from having a sense of opposition to Beauchamp; she pitied him for his infatuation, and in her lofty mental serenity she warmed to him for the seeming boyishness of his constant and extravagant worship of the man, though such an enthusiasm cast shadows on his intellect.

He was reading a sentence of the letter.

‘I hear nothing but the breeze, Nevil,’ she said.

The breeze fluttered the letter-sheets:  they threatened to fly.  Cecilia stepped two paces away.

‘Hark; there is a military band playing on the pier,’ said she.  ’I am so fond of hearing music a little off shore.’

Beauchamp consigned the letter to his pocket.

‘You are not offended, Nevil?’

‘Dear me, no.  You haven’t a mind for tonics, that’s all.’

‘Healthy persons rarely have,’ she remarked, and asked him, smiling softly, whether he had a mind for music.

His insensibility to music was curious, considering how impressionable he was to verse, and to songs of birds.  He listened with an oppressed look, as to something the particular secret of which had to be reached by a determined effort of sympathy for those whom it affected.  He liked it if she did, and said he liked it, reiterated that he liked it, clearly trying hard to comprehend it, as unmoved by the swell and sigh of the resonant brass as a man could be, while her romantic spirit thrilled to it, and was bountiful in glowing visions and in tenderness.

There hung her hand.  She would not have refused to yield it.  The hero of her childhood, the friend of her womanhood, and her hero still, might have taken her with half a word.