‘Not by speaking.’

’No, no; no assault:  not a word, and not a word against him.  Lay the wind to catch a gossamer.  I’ve had my experience of blowing cold, and trying to run her down.  He’s at Shrapnel’s.  He’ll be up here to-day, and I have an engagement in the town.  Don’t quit her side.  Let her fancy you are interested in some discussion—­Radicalism, if you like.’

Mr. Austin readily undertook to mount guard over her while her father rode into Bevisham on business.

The enemy appeared.

Cecilia saw him, and could not step to meet him for trouble of heart. 
It was bliss to know that he lived and was near.

A transient coldness following the fit of ecstasy enabled her to swin through the terrible first minutes face to face with him.

He folded her round like a mist; but it grew a problem to understand why Mr. Austin should be perpetually at hand, in the garden, in the woods, in the drawing-room, wheresoever she wakened up from one of her trances to see things as they were.

Yet Beauchamp, with a daring and cunning at which her soul exulted, and her feminine nature trembled, as at the divinely terrible, had managed to convey to her no less than if they had been alone together.

His parting words were:  ’I must have five minutes with your father to-morrow.’

How had she behaved?  What could be Seymour Austin’s idea of her?

She saw the blind thing that she was, the senseless thing, the shameless; and vulture-like in her scorn of herself, she alighted on that disgraced Cecilia and picked her to pieces hungrily.  It was clear:  Beauchamp had meant nothing beyond friendly civility:  it was only her abject greediness pecking at crumbs.  No! he loved her.  Could a woman’s heart be mistaken?  She melted and wept, thanking him:  she offered him her remnant of pride, pitiful to behold.

And still she asked herself between-whiles whether it could be true of an English lady of our day, that she, the fairest stature under sun, was ever knowingly twisted to this convulsion.  She seemed to look forth from a barred window on flower, and field, and hill.  Quietness existed as a vision.  Was it impossible to embrace it?  How pass into it?  By surrendering herself to the flames, like a soul unto death!  For why, if they were overpowering, attempt to resist them?  It flattered her to imagine that she had been resisting them in their present burning might ever since her lover stepped on the Esperanza’s deck at the mouth of Otley River.  How foolish, seeing that they are fatal!  A thrill of satisfaction swept her in reflecting that her ability to reason was thus active.  And she was instantly rewarded for surrendering; pain fled, to prove her reasoning good; the flames devoured her gently they cared not to torture so long as they had her to themselves.