It required Louise Wardour-Devereux’s apologies and interpretations to account for what appeared to Cecilia strangely ill-conditioned, if not insane, in Lady Romfrey’s behaviour.  The most astonishing thing to hear was, that Lady Romfrey had paid Mrs. Devereux a visit at her Surrey house unexpectedly one Sunday in the London season, for the purpose, as it became evident, of meeting Mr. Blackburn Tuckham:  and how she could have known that Mr. Tuckham would be there, Mrs. Devereux could not tell, for it was, Louise assured Cecilia, purely by chance that he and Mr. Lydiard were present:  but the countess obtained an interview with him alone, and Mr. Tuckham came from it declaring it to have been more terrible than any he had ever been called upon to endure.  The object of the countess was to persuade him to renounce his bride.

Louise replied to the natural inquiry—­’Upon what plea?’ with a significant evasiveness.  She put her arms round Cecilia’s neck:  ’I trust you are not unhappy.  You will get no release from him.’

‘I am not unhappy,’ said Cecilia, musically clear to convince her friend.

She was indeed glad to feel the stout chains of her anchor restraining her when Lady Romfrey talked of Nevil; they were like the safety of marriage without the dreaded ceremony, and with solitude to let her weep.  Bound thus to a weaker man than Blackburn Tuckham, though he had been more warmly esteemed, her fancy would have drifted away over the deeps, perhaps her cherished loyalty would have drowned in her tears—­for Lady Romfrey tasked it very severely:  but he from whom she could hope for no release, gave her some of the firmness which her nature craved in this trial.

From saying quietly to her:  ‘I thought once you loved him,’ when alluding to Nevil, Lady Romfrey passed to mournful exclamations, and by degrees on to direct entreaties.  She related the whole story of Renee in England, and appeared distressed with a desperate wonderment at Cecilia’s mildness after hearing it.  Her hearer would have imagined that she had no moral sense, if it had not been so perceptible that the poor lady’s mind was distempered on the one subject of Nevil Beauchamp.  Cecilia’s high conception of duty, wherein she was a peerless flower of our English civilization, was incommunicable:  she could practise, not explain it.  She bowed to Lady Romfrey’s praises of Nevil, suffered her hands to be wrung, her heart to be touched, all but an avowal of her love of him to be wrested from her, and not the less did she retain her cold resolution to marry to please her father and fulfil her pledge.  In truth, it was too late to speak of Renee to her now.  It did not beseem Cecilia to remember that she had ever been a victim of jealousy; and while confessing to many errors, because she felt them, and gained a necessary strength from them—­in the comfort of the consciousness of pain, for example, which she sorely needed, that the pain in her own breast might deaden