’Were you astonished at my asking you for your hand?  You said “mine?” as if you wondered.  You have known my feelings for you.  Can you deny that?  I have reckoned on yours—­too long?—­But not falsely?  No, hear me out.  The truth is, I cannot lose you.  And don’t look so resolute.  Overlook little wounds:  I was never indifferent to you.  How could I be—­with eyes in my head?  The colonel is opposed to me of course:  he will learn to understand me better:  but you and I! we cannot be mere friends.  It’s like daylight blotted out—­or the eyes gone blind:—­Too late?  Can you repeat it?  I tried to warn you before you left England:  I should have written a letter to put you on your guard against my enemies:—­I find I have some:  but a letter is sure to stumble; I should have been obliged to tell you that I do not stand on my defence; and I thought I should see you the next day.  You went:  and not a word for me!  You gave me no chance.  If you have no confidence in me I must bear it.  I may say the story is false.  With your hand in mine I would swear it.’

‘Let it be forgotten,’ said Cecilia, surprised and shaken to think that her situation required further explanations; fascinated and unnerved by simply hearing him.  ‘We are now—­we are walking away from the house.’

‘Do you object to a walk with me?’

They had crossed the garden plot and were at the gate of the park leading to the Western wood.  Beauchamp swung the gate open.  He cast a look at the clouds coming up from the South-west in folds of grey and silver.

‘Like the day of our drive into Bevisham!—­without the storm behind,’ he said, and doated on her soft shut lips, and the mild sun-rays of her hair in sunless light.  ’There are flowers that grow only in certain valleys, and your home is Mount Laurels, whatever your fancy may be for Italy.  You colour the whole region for me.  When you were absent, you were here.  I called here six times, and walked and talked with you.’

Cecilia set her face to the garden.  Her heart had entered on a course of heavy thumping, like a sapper in the mine.

Pain was not unwelcome to her, but this threatened weakness.

What plain words could she use?  If Mr. Tuckham had been away from the house, she would have found it easier to speak of her engagement; she knew not why.  Or if the imperative communication could have been delivered in Italian or French, she was as little able to say why it should have slipped from her tongue without a critic shudder to arrest it.  She was cold enough to revolve the words:  betrothed, affianced, plighted:  and reject them, pretty words as they are.  Between the vulgarity of romantic language, and the baldness of commonplace, it seemed to her that our English gives us no choice; that we cannot be dignified in simplicity.  And for some reason, feminine and remote, she now detested her ‘hand’ so much as to be unable to bring herself to the metonymic mention of it.  The lady’s