Mr. Austin paid no heed to the colonel’s ‘Dear me! dear me!’ of amazement.  He said of the style of the letters, that it was the puffing of a giant:  a strong wind rather than speech:  and begged Cecilia to note that men who labour to force their dreams on mankind and turn vapour into fact, usually adopt such a style.  Hearing that this private letter had been deliberately read through by Mr. Romfrey, and handed by him to Captain Baskelett, who had read it out in various places, Mr. Austin said: 

‘A strange couple!’ He appeared perplexed by his old friend’s approval of them.  ‘There we decidedly differ,’ said he, when the case of Dr. Shrapnel was related by the colonel, with a refusal to condemn Mr. Romfrey.  He pronounced Mr. Romfrey’s charges against Dr. Shrapnel, taken in conjunction with his conduct, to be baseless, childish, and wanton.  The colonel would not see the case in that light; but Cecilia did.  It was a justification of Beauchamp; and how could she ever have been blind to it?—­scarcely blind, she remembered, but sensitively blinking her eyelids to distract her sight in contemplating it, and to preserve her repose.  As to Beauchamp’s demand of the apology, Mr. Austin considered that it might be an instance of his want of knowledge of men, yet could not be called silly, and to call it insane was the rhetoric of an adversary.

‘I do call it insane,’ said the colonel.

He separated himself from his daughter by a sharp division.

Had Beauchamp appeared at Mount Laurels, Cecilia would have been ready to support and encourage him, boldly.  Backed by Mr. Austin, she saw some good in Dr. Shrapnel’s writing, much in Beauchamp’s devotedness.  He shone clear to her reason, at last:  partly because her father in his opposition to him did not, but was on the contrary unreasonable, cased in mail, mentally clouded.  She sat with Mr. Austin and her father, trying repeatedly, in obedience to Beauchamp’s commands, to bring the latter to a just contemplation of the unhappy case; behaviour on her part which rendered the colonel inveterate.

Beauchamp at this moment was occupied in doing secretary’s work for Dr. Shrapnel.  So Cecilia learnt from Mr. Lydiard, who came to pay his respects to Mrs. Wardour-Devereux at Mount Laurels.  The pursuit of the apology was continued in letters to his uncle and occasional interviews with him, which were by no means instigated by the doctor, Mr. Lydiard informed the ladies.  He described Beauchamp as acting in the spirit of a man who has sworn an oath to abandon every pleasure in life, that he may, as far as it lies in his power, indemnify his friend for the wrong done to him.

‘Such men are too terrible for me,’ said Mrs. Devereux.

Cecilia thought the reverse:  Not for me!  But she felt a strain upon her nature, and she was miserable in her alienation from her father.  Kissing him one night, she laid her head on his breast, and begged his forgiveness.  He embraced her tenderly.  ’Wait, only wait; you will see I am right,’ he said, and prudently said no more, and did not ask her to speak.