‘Cecilia’s?  Where?’ said Beauchamp.

‘It is at Steynham.’  Rosamund primmed her lips at the success of her probing touch; but she was unaware of the chief reason for his doting on those fair locks, and how they coloured his imagination since the day of the drive into Bevisham.

‘Now leave me, my dear Nevil,’ she said.  ’Lord Romfrey will soon be here, and it is as well for the moment that you should not meet him, if it can be avoided.’

Beauchamp left her, like a man out-argued and overcome.  He had no wish to meet his uncle, whose behaviour in contracting a misalliance and casting a shadow on the family, in a manner so perfectly objectless and senseless, appeared to him to call for the reverse of compliments.  Cecilia’s lock of hair lying at Steynham hung in his mind.  He saw the smooth flat curl lying secret like a smile.

The graceful head it had fallen from was dimmer in his mental eye.  He went so far in this charmed meditation as to feel envy of the possessor of the severed lock:  passingly he wondered, with the wonder of reproach, that the possessor should deem it enough to possess the lock, and resign it to a drawer or a desk.  And as when life rolls back on us after the long ebb of illness, little whispers and diminutive images of the old joys and prizes of life arrest and fill our hearts; or as, to men who have been beaten down by storms, the opening of a daisy is dearer than the blazing orient which bids it open; so the visionary lock of Cecilia’s hair became Cecilia’s self to Beauchamp, yielding him as much of her as he could bear to think of, for his heart was shattered.

Why had she given it to his warmest friend?  For the asking, probably.

This question was the first ripple of the breeze from other emotions beginning to flow fast.

He walked out of London, to be alone, and to think and from the palings of a road on a South-western run of high land, he gazed, at the great city—­a place conquerable yet, with the proper appliances for subjugating it:  the starting of his daily newspaper, the dawn, say, as a commencement.  It began to seem a possible enterprise.  It soon seemed a proximate one.  If Cecilia!  He left the exclamation a blank, but not an empty dash in the brain; rather like the shroud of night on a vast and gloriously imagined land.

Nay, the prospect was partly visible, as the unknown country becomes by degrees to the traveller’s optics on the dark hill-tops.  It is much, of course, to be domestically well-mated:  but to be fortified and armed by one’s wife with a weapon to fight the world, is rare good fortune; a rapturous and an infinite satisfaction.  He could now support of his own resources a weekly paper.  A paper published weekly, however, is a poor thing, out of the tide, behind the date, mainly a literary periodical, no foremost combatant in politics, no champion in the arena; hardly better than a commentator