Now there was no retreat for either of them!

She awoke to this conviction after a flight of blushes that burnt her thoughts to ashes as they sprang.  Thoughts born blushing, all of the crimson colour, a rose-garden, succeeded, and corresponding with their speed her feet paced the room, both slender hands crossed at her throat under an uplifted chin, and the curves of her dark eyelashes dropped as in a swoon.

‘He loves me!’ The attestation of it had been visible.  ‘No one but me!’ Was that so evident?

Her father picked up silly stories of him—­a man who made enemies recklessly!

Cecilia was petrified by a gentle tapping at her door.  Her father called to her, and she threw on her dressing-gown, and opened the door.

The colonel was in his riding-suit.

‘I haven’t slept a wink, and I find it’s the same with you,’ he said, paining her with his distressed kind eyes.  ’I ought not to have hinted anything last night without proofs.  Austin’s as unhappy as I am.’

‘At what, my dear papa, at what?’ cried Cecilia.

’I ride over to Steynham this morning, and I shall bring you proofs, my poor child, proofs.  That foreign tangle of his . . .’

‘You speak of Nevil, papa?’

’It’s a common scandal over London.  That Frenchwoman was found at Lord Romfrey’s house; Lady Romfrey cloaked it.  I believe the woman would swear black’s white to make Nevil Beauchamp appear an angel; and he’s a desperately cunning hand with women.  You doubt that.’

She had shuddered slightly.

’You won’t doubt if I bring you proofs.  Till I come back from Steynham, I ask you not to see him alone:  not to go out to him.’

The colonel glanced at her windows.

Cecilia submitted to the request, out of breath, consenting to feel like a tutored girl, that she might conceal her guilty knowledge of what was to be seen through the windows.

‘Now I’m off,’ said he, and kissed her.

‘If you would accept Nevil’s word!’ she murmured.

‘Not where women are concerned!’

He left her with this remark, which found no jealous response in her heart, yet ranged over certain dispersed inflammable grains, like a match applied to damp powder; again and again running in little leaps of harmless firm keeping her alive to its existence, and surprising her that it should not have been extinguished.

Beauchamp presented himself rather late in the afternoon, when Mr. Austin and Blackburn Tuckham were sipping tea in Cecilia’s boudoir with that lady, and a cousin of her sex, by whom she was led to notice a faint discoloration over one of his eyes, that was, considering whence it came, repulsive to compassion.  A blow at a Radical meeting!  He spoke of Dr. Shrapnel to Tuckham, and assuredly could not complain that the latter was unsympathetic in regard to the old man’s health, though when he said, ‘Poor old man! he fears he will die!’ Tuckham rejoined:  ’He had better make his peace.’