Beauchamp was thinking:  She can listen to that brass band, and she shuts her ears to this letter: 

The reading of it would have been a prelude to the opening of his heart to her, at the same time that it vindicated his dear and honoured master, as he called Dr. Shrapnel.  To speak, without the explanation of his previous reticence which this letter would afford, seemed useless:  even the desire to speak was absent, passion being absent.

‘I see papa; he is getting into a boat with some one,’ said Cecilia, and gave orders for the yacht to stand in toward the Club steps.  ’Do you know, Nevil, the Italian common people are not so subject to the charm of music as other races?  They have more of the gift, and I think less of the feeling.  You do not hear much music in Italy.  I remember in the year of Revolution there was danger of a rising in some Austrian city, and a colonel of a regiment commanded his band to play.  The mob was put in good humour immediately.’

‘It’s a soporific,’ said Beauchamp.

‘You would not rather have had them rise to be slaughtered?’

‘Would you have them waltzed into perpetual servility?’

Cecilia hummed, and suggested:  ‘If one can have them happy in any way?’

‘Then the day of destruction may almost be dated.’

‘Nevil, your terrible view of life must be false.’

’I make it out worse to you than to any one else, because I want our minds to be united.’

‘Give me a respite now and then.’

’With all my heart.  And forgive me for beating my drum.  I see what others don’t see, or else I feel it more; I don’t know; but it appears to me our country needs rousing if it’s to live.  There ’s a division between poor and rich that you have no conception of, and it can’t safely be left unnoticed.  I’ve done.’

He looked at her and saw tears on her under-lids.

‘My dearest Cecilia!’

‘Music makes me childish,’ said she.

Her father was approaching in the boat.  Beside him sat the Earl of
Lockrace, latterly classed among the suitors of the lady of Mount
Laurels.

A few minutes remained to Beauchamp of his lost opportunity.  Instead of seizing them with his usual promptitude, he let them slip, painfully mindful of his treatment of her last year after the drive into Bevisham, when she was England, and Renee holiday France.

This feeling he fervently translated into the reflection that the bride who would bring him beauty and wealth, and her especial gift of tender womanliness, was not yet so thoroughly mastered as to grant her husband his just prevalence with her, or even indeed his complete independence of action, without which life itself was not desireable.

Colonel Halkett stared at Beauchamp as if he had risen from the deep.

‘Have you been in that town this morning?’ was one of his first questions to him when he stood on board.