Dr. Shrapnel’s ‘Ego-Ego’ yelped and gave chase to her through the pure beatitudes of her earlier days down to her present regrets.  It hunted all the saints in the calendar till their haloes top-sided on their heads-her favourite St. Francis of Assisi excepted.

The doctor was called up from Bevisham next day, and pronounced her bilious.  He was humorous over Captain Beauchamp, who had gone to the parents of the dead girl, and gathered the information that they were a consumptive family, to vindicate Dr. Shrapnel.  ’The very family to require strong nourishment,’ said the doctor.

Cecilia did not rest in her sick-room before, hunting through one book and another, she had found arguments on the contrary side; a waste of labour that heaped oppression on her chest, as with the world’s weight.  Apparently one had only to be in Beauchamp’s track to experience that.  She horrified her father by asking questions about consumption.  Homoeopathy, hydropathy,—­the revolutionaries of medicine attracted her.  Blackburn Tuckham, a model for an elected lover who is not beloved, promised to procure all sorts of treatises for her:  no man could have been so deferential to a diseased mind.  Beyond calling her by her Christian name, he did nothing to distress her with the broad aspect of their new relations together.  He and Mr. Austin departed from Mount Laurels, leaving her to sink into an agreeable stupor, like one deposited on a mudbank after buffeting the waves.  She learnt that her father had seen Captain Baskelett, and remembered, marvelling, how her personal dread of an interview, that threatened to compromise her ideal of her feminine and peculiar dignity, had assisted to precipitate her where she now lay helpless, almost inanimate.

She was unaware of the passage of time save when her father spoke of a marriage-day.  It told her that she lived and was moving.  The fear of death is not stronger in us, nor the desire to put it off, than Cecilia’s shunning of such a day.  The naming of it numbed her blood like a snakebite.  Yet she openly acknowledged her engagement; and, happily for Tuckham, his visits, both in London and at Mount Laurels, were few and short, and he inflicted no foretaste of her coming subjection to him to alarm her.

Under her air of calm abstraction she watched him rigorously for some sign of his ownership that should tempt her to revolt from her pledge, or at least dream of breaking loose:  the dream would have sufficed.  He was never intrusive, never pressing.  He did not vex, because he absolutely trusted to the noble loyalty which made her admit to herself that she belonged irrevocably to him, while her thoughts were upon Beauchamp.  With a respectful gravity he submitted to her perusal a collection of treatises on diet, classed pro and con., and paged and pencil-marked to simplify her study of the question.  They sketched in company; she played music to him, he read poetry to her, and read it well.  He seemed to feel the beauty of it sensitively, as she did critically.  In other days the positions had been reversed.  He invariably talked of Beauchamp with kindness, deploring only that he should be squandering his money on workmen’s halls and other hazy projects down in Bevisham.