Colonel Halkett and Cecilia beheld him from the breakfast-room returning with Beauchamp, who had waylaid him and was hammering his part in the now endless altercation.  It could be descried at any distance; and how fine was Mr. Romfrey’s bearing!—­truly noble by contrast, as of a grave big dog worried by a small barking dog.  There is to an unsympathetic observer an intense vexatiousness in the exhibition of such pertinacity.  To a soldier accustomed at a glance to estimate powers of attack and defence, this repeated puny assailing of a, fortress that required years of siege was in addition ridiculous.  Mr. Romfrey appeared impregnable, and Beauchamp mad.  ‘He’s foaming again!’ said the colonel, and was only ultra-pictorial.  ‘Before breakfast!’ was a further slur on Beauchamp.

Mr. Romfrey was elevated by the extraordinary comicality of the notion of the proposed apology to heights of humour beyond laughter, whence we see the unbounded capacity of the general man for folly, and rather commiserate than deride him.  He was quite untroubled.  It demanded a steady view of the other side of the case to suppose of one whose control of his temper was perfect, that he could be in the wrong.  He at least did not think so, and Colonel Halkett relied on his common sense.  Beauchamp’s brows were smouldering heavily, except when he had to talk.  He looked paleish and worn, and said he had been up early.  Cecilia guessed that he had not been to bed.

It was dexterously contrived by her host, in spite of the colonel’s manifest anxiety to keep them asunder, that she should have some minutes with Beauchamp out in the gardens.  Mr. Romfrey led them out, and then led the colonel away to offer him a choice of pups of rare breed.

‘Nevil,’ said Cecilia, ’you will not think it presumption in me to give you advice?’

Her counsel to him was, that he should leave Steynham immediately, and trust to time for his uncle to reconsider his conduct.

Beauchamp urged the counter-argument of the stain on the family honour.

She hinted at expediency; he frankly repudiated it.

The downs faced them, where the heavenly vast ‘might have been’ of yesterday wandered thinner than a shadow of to-day; weaving a story without beginning, crisis, or conclusion, flowerless and fruitless, but with something of infinite in it sweeter to brood on than the future of her life to Cecilia.

‘If meanwhile Dr. Shrapnel should die, and repentance comes too late!’ said Beauchamp.

She had no clear answer to that, save the hope of its being an unfounded apprehension.  ’As far as it is in my power, Nevil, I will avoid injustice to him in my thoughts.’

He gazed at her thankfully.  ‘Well,’ said he, ’that’s like sighting the cliffs.  But I don’t feel home round me while the colonel is so strangely prepossessed.  For a high-spirited gentleman like your father to approve, or at least accept, an act so barbarous is incomprehensible.  Speak to him, Cecilia, will you?  Let him know your ideas.’