She assented.  He said instantly, ’Persuade him to speak to my uncle Everard.’

She was tempted to smile.

‘I must do only what I think wise, if I am to be of service, Nevil.’

’True, but paint that scene to him.  An old man, utterly defenceless, making no defence! a cruel error.  The colonel can’t, or he doesn’t, clearly get it inside him, otherwise I’m certain it would revolt him:  just as I am certain my uncle Everard is at this moment a stone-blind man.  If he has done a thing, he can’t question it, won’t examine it.  The thing becomes a part of him, as much as his hand or his head.  He ’s a man of the twelfth century.  Your father might be helped to understand him first.’

‘Yes,’ she said, not very warmly, though sadly.

’Tell the colonel how it must have been brought about.  For Cecil Baskelett called on Dr. Shrapnel two days before Mr. Romfrey stood at his gate.’

The name of Cecil caused her to draw in her shoulders in a half-shudder.  ‘It may indeed be Captain Baskelett who set this cruel thing in motion!’

’Then point that out to your father, said he, perceiving a chance of winning her to his views through a concrete object of her dislike, and cooling toward the woman who betrayed a vulgar characteristic of her sex; who was merely woman, unable sternly to recognize the doing of a foul wrong because of her antipathy, until another antipathy enlightened her.

He wanted in fact a ready-made heroine, and did not give her credit for the absence of fire in her blood, as well as for the unexercised imagination which excludes young women from the power to realize unwonted circumstances.  We men walking about the world have perhaps no more imagination of matters not domestic than they; but what we have is quick with experience:  we see the thing we hear of:  women come to it how they can.

Cecilia was recommended to weave a narrative for her father, and ultimately induce him, if she could, to give a gentleman’s opinion of the case to Mr. Romfrey.

Her sensitive ear caught a change of tone in the directions she received.  ‘Your father will say so and so:  answer him with this and that.’  Beauchamp supplied her with phrases.  She was to renew and renew the attack; hammer as he did.  Yesterday she had followed him:  to-day she was to march beside him—­hardly as an equal.  Patience! was the word she would have uttered in her detection of the one frailty in his nature which this hurrying of her off her feet opened her eyes to with unusual perspicacity.  Still she leaned to him sufficiently to admit that he had grounds for a deep disturbance of his feelings.

He said:  ’I go to Dr. Shrapnel’s cottage, and don’t know how to hold up my head before Miss Denham.  She confided him to me when she left for Switzerland!’

There was that to be thought of, certainly.

Colonel Halkett came round a box-bush and discovered them pacing together in a fashion to satisfy his paternal scrutiny.