Fair companies of racing yachts were left behind.  The gales of August mattered frightfully to poor Blackburn Tuckham, who was to be dropped at a town in South Wales, and descended greenish to his cabin as soon as they had crashed on the first wall-waves of the chalk-race, a throw beyond the peaked cliffs edged with cormorants, and were really tasting sea.  Cecilia reclined on deck, wrapped in shawl and waterproof.  As the Alpine climber claims the upper air, she had the wild sea to herself through her love of it; quite to herself.  It was delicious to look round and ahead, and the perturbation was just enough to preserve her from thoughts too deep inward in a scene where the ghost of Nevil was abroad.

The hard dry gale increased.  Her father, stretched beside her, drew her attention to a small cutter under double-reefed main-sail and small jib on the Esperanza’s weather bow—­a gallant boat carefully handled.  She watched it with some anxiety, but the Esperanza was bound for a Devon bay, and bore away from the black Dorsetshire headland, leaving the little cutter to run into haven if she pleased.  The passing her was no event.—­In a representation of the common events befalling us in these times, upon an appreciation of which this history depends, one turns at whiles a languishing glance toward the vast potential mood, pluperfect tense.  For Nevil Beauchamp was on board the cutter, steering her, with Dr. Shrapnel and Lydiard in the well, and if an accident had happened to cutter or schooner, what else might not have happened?  Cecilia gathered it from Mrs. Wardour-Devereux, whom, to her surprise and pleasure, she found at Romfrey Castle.  Her friend Louise received a letter from Mr. Lydiard, containing a literary amateur seaman’s log of a cruise of a fifteen-ton cutter in a gale, and a pure literary sketch of Beauchamp standing drenched at the helm from five in the morning up to nine at night, munching a biscuit for nourishment.  The beautiful widow prepared the way for what was very soon to be publicly known concerning herself by reading out this passage of her correspondent’s letter in the breakfast room.

‘Yes, the fellow’s a sailor!’ said Lord Romfrey.

The countess rose from her chair and walked out.

‘Now, was that abuse of the fellow?’ the old lord asked Colonel Halkett.  ’I said he was a sailor, I said nothing else.  He is a sailor, and he’s fit for nothing else, and no ship will he get unless he bends his neck never ‘s nearer it.’

He hesitated a moment, and went after his wife.

Cecilia sat with the countess, in the afternoon, at a window overlooking the swelling woods of Romfrey.  She praised the loveliness of the view.

‘It is fire to me,’ said Rosamund.

Cecilia looked at her, startled.  Rosamund said no more.

She was an excellent hostess, nevertheless, unpretending and simple in company; and only when it chanced that Beauchamp’s name was mentioned did she cast that quick supplicating nervous glance at the earl, with a shadow of an elevation of her shoulders, as if in apprehension of mordant pain.