He can never get a ship:  his career’s cut short, he’s a rudderless boat.  A gentleman drifting to Bedlam, his uncle calls him.  I call his treatment of Grancey Lespel anything but gentlemanly.  This is the sort of fellow my girl worships!  What can I do?  I can’t interdict the house to him:  it would only make matters worse.  Thank God, the fellow hangs fire somehow, and doesn’t come to me.  I expect it every day, either in a letter or the man in person.  And I declare to heaven I’d rather be threading a Khyber Pass with my poor old friend who fell to a shot there.’

‘She certainly has another voice,’ Mr. Austin assented gravely.

He did not look on Beauchamp as the best of possible husbands for Cecilia.

‘Let her see that you’re anxious, Austin,’ said the colonel.  ’I’m her old opponent in this affair.  She loves me, but she’s accustomed to think me prejudiced:  you she won’t.  You may have a good effect.’

‘Not by speaking.’

’No, no; no assault:  not a word, and not a word against him.  Lay the wind to catch a gossamer.  I’ve had my experience of blowing cold, and trying to run her down.  He’s at Shrapnel’s.  He’ll be up here to-day, and I have an engagement in the town.  Don’t quit her side.  Let her fancy you are interested in some discussion—­Radicalism, if you like.’

Mr. Austin readily undertook to mount guard over her while her father rode into Bevisham on business.

The enemy appeared.

Cecilia saw him, and could not step to meet him for trouble of heart.  It was bliss to know that he lived and was near.

A transient coldness following the fit of ecstasy enabled her to swin through the terrible first minutes face to face with him.

He folded her round like a mist; but it grew a problem to understand why Mr. Austin should be perpetually at hand, in the garden, in the woods, in the drawing-room, wheresoever she wakened up from one of her trances to see things as they were.

Yet Beauchamp, with a daring and cunning at which her soul exulted, and her feminine nature trembled, as at the divinely terrible, had managed to convey to her no less than if they had been alone together.

His parting words were:  ’I must have five minutes with your father to-morrow.’

How had she behaved?  What could be Seymour Austin’s idea of her?

She saw the blind thing that she was, the senseless thing, the shameless; and vulture-like in her scorn of herself, she alighted on that disgraced Cecilia and picked her to pieces hungrily.  It was clear:  Beauchamp had meant nothing beyond friendly civility:  it was only her abject greediness pecking at crumbs.  No! he loved her.  Could a woman’s heart be mistaken?  She melted and wept, thanking him:  she offered him her remnant of pride, pitiful to behold.