‘Ah?  Captain Beauchamp!’ the doctor bowed to him.  ’But my case was one of poor blood requiring to be strengthened.  The girl was allowed to sink so low that stimulants were ineffective when I stepped in.  There’s the point.  It ’s all very well while you are in health.  You may do without meat till your system demands the stimulant, or else—­as with this poor girl!  And, indeed, Captain Beauchamp, if I may venture the remark—­I had the pleasure of seeing you during the last Election in our town—­and if I may be so bold, I should venture to hint that the avoidance of animal food—­to judge by appearances—­has not been quite wholesome for you.’

Eyes were turned on Beauchamp.

CHAPTER XLVIII

OF THE TRIAL AWAITING THE EARL OF ROMFREY

Cecilia softly dropped her father’s arm, and went into the house.  The exceeding pallor of Beauchamp’s face haunted her in her room.  She heard the controversy proceeding below, and an exclamation of Blackburn Tuckham’s:  ’Immorality of meat-eating?  What nonsense are they up to now?’

Beauchamp was inaudible, save in a word or two.  As usual, he was the solitary minority.

But how mournfully changed he was!  She had not noticed it, agitated by her own emotions as she had been, and at one time three parts frozen.  He was the ghost of the Nevil Beauchamp who had sprung on the deck of the Esperanza out of Lieutenant Wilmore’s boat, that sunny breezy day which was the bright first chapter of her new life—­of her late life, as it seemed to her now, for she was dead to it, and another creature, the coldest of the women of earth.  She felt sensibly cold, coveted warmth, flung a shawl on her shoulders, and sat in a corner of her room, hidden and shivering beside the open window, till long after the gentlemen had ceased to speak.

How much he must have suffered of late!  The room she had looked to as a refuge from Nevil was now her stronghold against the man whom she had incredibly accepted.  She remained there, the victim of a heart malady, under the term of headache.  Feeling entrapped, she considered that she must have been encircled and betrayed.  She looked back on herself as a giddy figure falling into a pit:  and in the pit she lay.

And how vile to have suspected of unfaithfulness and sordidness the generous and stedfast man of earth!  He never abandoned a common friendship.  His love of his country was love still, whatever the form it had taken.  His childlike reliance on effort and outspeaking, for which men laughed at him, was beautiful.

Where am I? she cried amid her melting images of him, all dominated by his wan features.  She was bound fast, imprisoned and a slave.  Even Mr. Austin had conspired against him:  for only she read Nevil justly.  His defence of Dr. Shrapnel filled her with an envy that no longer maligned the object of it, but was humble, and like the desire of the sick to creep into sunshine.