‘So I thought,’ Mr. Tuckham responded.  ’One doesn’t want the man to be hurt, but he ought to be put down in some way.  My belief is he’s a Fire-worshipper.  I warrant I would extinguish him if he came before me.  He’s an incendiary, at any rate.’

‘Do you think,’ said Cecilia, ’that Captain Beauchamp is now satisfied with his experience of politics?’

‘Dear me, no,’ said Mr. Tuckham.  ’It’s the opening of a campaign.  He’s off to the North, after he has been to Sussex and Bucks.  He’s to be at it all his life.  One thing he shows common sense in.  If I heard him once I heard him say half-a-dozen times, that he must have money:—­“I must have money!” And so he must if he ’s to head the Radicals.  He wants to start a newspaper!  Is he likely to get money from his uncle Romfrey?’

‘Not for his present plan of campaign.’  Colonel Halkett enunciated the military word sarcastically.  ‘Let’s hope he won’t get money.’

‘He says he must have it.’

‘Who is to stand and deliver, then?’

’I don’t know; I only repeat what he says:  unless he has an eye on my Aunt Beauchamp; and I doubt his luck there, if he wants money for political campaigning.’

‘Money!’ Colonel Halkett ejaculated.

That word too was in the heart of the heiress.

Nevil must have money!  Could he have said it?  Ordinary men might say or think it inoffensively; Captain Baskelett, for instance:  but not Nevil Beauchamp.

Captain Baskelett, as she had conveyed the information to her father for his comfort in the dumb domestic language familiar between them on these occasions, had proposed to her unavailingly.  Italian and English gentlemen were in the list of her rejected suitors:  and hitherto she had seen them come and go, one might say, from a watchtower in the skies.  None of them was the ideal she waited for:  what their feelings were, their wishes, their aims, she had not reflected on.  They dotted the landscape beneath the unassailable heights, busy after their fashion, somewhat quaint, much like the pigmy husbandmen in the fields were to the giant’s daughter, who had more curiosity than Cecilia.  But Nevil Beauchamp had compelled her to quit her lofty station, pulled her low as the littlest of women that throb and flush at one man’s footstep:  and being well able to read the nature and aspirations of Captain Baskelett, it was with the knowledge of her having been proposed to as heiress of a great fortune that she chanced to hear of Nevil’s resolve to have money.  If he did say it!  And was anything likelier? was anything unlikelier?  His foreign love denied to him, why, now he devoted himself to money:  money—­the last consideration of a man so single-mindedly generous as he!  But he must have money to pursue his contest!  But would he forfeit the truth in him for money for any purpose?

The debate on this question grew as incessant as the thought of him.  Was it not to be supposed that the madness of the pursuit of his political chimaera might change his character?