Surely Cecilia, who judged him sincere, might be bent to join hands with him for so good a work!  She would bring riches to her husband:  sufficient.  He required the ablest men of the country to write for him, and it was just that they should be largely paid.  They at least in their present public apathy would demand it.  To fight the brewers, distillers, publicans, the shopkeepers, the parsons, the landlords, the law limpets, and also the indifferents, the logs, the cravens and the fools, high talent was needed, and an ardour stimulated by rates of pay outdoing the offers of the lucre-journals.  A large annual outlay would therefore be needed; possibly for as long as a quarter of a century.  Cecilia and her husband would have to live modestly.  But her inheritance would be immense.  Colonel Halkett had never spent a tenth of his income.  In time he might be taught to perceive in the dawn the one greatly beneficent enterprise of his day.  He might through his daughter’s eyes, and the growing success of the Journal.  Benevolent and gallant old man, patriotic as he was, and kind at heart, he might learn to see in the dawn a broader channel of philanthropy and chivalry than any we have yet had a notion of in England!—­a school of popular education into the bargain.

Beauchamp reverted to the shining curl.  It could not have been clearer to vision if it had lain under his eyes.

Ay, that first wild life of his was dead.  He had slain it.  Now for the second and sober life!  Who can say?  The Countess of Romfrey suggested it:—­Cecilia may have prompted him in his unknown heart to the sacrifice of a lawless love, though he took it for simply barren iron duty.  Brooding on her, he began to fancy the victory over himself less and less a lame one:  for it waxed less and less difficult in his contemplation of it.  He was looking forward instead of back.

Who cut off the lock?  Probably Cecilia herself; and thinking at the moment that he would see it, perhaps beg for it.  The lustrous little ring of hair wound round his heart; smiled both on its emotions and its aims; bound them in one.

But proportionately as he grew tender to Cecilia, his consideration for Renee increased; that became a law to him:  pity nourished it, and glimpses of self-contempt, and something like worship of her high-heartedness.

He wrote to the countess, forbidding her sharply and absolutely to attempt a vindication of him by explanations to any persons whomsoever; and stating that he would have no falsehoods told, he desired her to keep to the original tale of the visit of the French family to her as guests of the Countess of Romfrey.  Contradictory indeed.  Rosamund shook her head over him.  For a wilful character that is guilty of issuing contradictory commands to friends who would be friends in spite of him, appears to be expressly angling for the cynical spirit, so surely does it