‘Nevil, I feel grief, and beg you to cease.   I am----It is-----’

“‘Too late’ has not a rag of meaning, Cecilia!  I love your name.  I love this too:  this is mine, and no one can rob me of it.’

He drew forth a golden locket and showed her a curl of her hair.

Crimsoning, she said instantly:  ’Language of the kind I used is open to misconstruction, I fear.  I have not even the right to listen to you.  I am . . .  You ask me for what I have it no longer in my power to give.  I am engaged.’

The shot rang through him and partly stunned him; but incredulity made a mocking effort to sustain him.  The greater wounds do not immediately convince us of our fate, though we may be conscious that we have been hit.

‘Engaged in earnest?’ said he.

‘Yes.’

‘Of your free will?’

‘Yes.’

Her father stepped out on the terrace, from one of the open windows, trailing a newspaper like a pocket-handkerchief.  Cecilia threaded the flower-beds to meet him.

‘Here’s an accident to one of our ironclads,’ he called to Beauchamp.

‘Lives lost, sir?’

’No, thank heaven! but, upon my word, it’s a warning.  Read the telegram; it’s the Hastings.  If these are our defences, at a cost of half a million of money, each of them, the sooner we look to our land forces the better.’

‘The Shop will not be considered safe!’ said Beauchamp, taking in the telegram at a glance.  ’Peppel’s a first-rate officer too:  she couldn’t have had a better captain.  Ship seriously damaged!’

He handed back the paper to the colonel.

Cecilia expected him to say that he had foreseen such an event.

He said nothing; and with a singular contraction of the heart she recollected how he had denounced our system of preparing mainly for the defensive in war, on a day when they stood together in the park, watching the slow passage of that very ship, the Hastings, along the broad water, distant below them.  The ‘swarms of swift vessels of attack,’ she recollected particularly, and ’small wasps and rams under mighty steam-power,’ that he used to harp on when declaring that England must be known for the assailant in war:  she was to ‘ray out’ her worrying fleets.  ’The defensive is perilous policy in war’:  he had said it.  She recollected also her childish ridicule of his excess of emphasis:  he certainly had foresight.’

Mr. Austin and Mr. Tuckham came strolling in conversation round the house to the terrace.  Beauchamp bowed to the former, nodded to the latter, scrutinizing him after he had done so, as if the flash of a thought were in his mind.  Tuckham’s radiant aspect possibly excited it:  ’Congratulate me!’ was the honest outcry of his face and frame.  He was as over-flowingly rosy as a victorious candidate at the hustings commencing a speech.  Cecilia laid her hand on an urn, in dread of the next words from either of the persons present.  Her father put an arm in hers, and leaned on her.  She gazed at her chamber window above, wishing to be wafted thither to her seclusion within.  The trembling limbs of physical irresoluteness was a new experience to her.