dangerous though his teachings were.  Outside politics Mr. Tuckham went altogether with Beauchamp.  He promised also that old Mrs. Beauchamp should be accurately informed of the state of matters between Captain Beauchamp and Mr. Romfrey.  He left Mount Laurels to go back in attendance on the venerable lady, without once afflicting Cecilia with a shiver of well-founded apprehension, and she was grateful to him almost to friendly affection in the vanishing of her unjust suspicion, until her father hinted that there was the man of his heart.  Then she closed all avenues to her own.

A period of maidenly distress not previously unknown to her ensued.  Proposals of marriage were addressed to her by two untitled gentlemen, and by the Earl of Lockrace:  three within a fortnight.  The recognition of the young heiress’s beauty at the Yacht Ball was accountable for the bursting out of these fires.  Her father would not have deplored her acceptance of the title of Countess of Lockrace.  In the matter of rejections, however, her will was paramount, and he was on her side against relatives when the subject was debated among them.  He called her attention to the fact impressively, telling her that she should not hear a syllable from him to persuade her to marry:  the emphasis of which struck the unspoken warning on her intelligence:  Bring no man to me of whom I do not approve!

‘Worthier of you, as I hope to become,’ Beauchamp had said.  Cecilia lit on that part of Dr. Shrapnel’s letter where ‘Fight this out within you,’ distinctly alluded to the unholy love.  Could she think ill of the man who thus advised him?  She shared Beauchamp’s painful feeling for him in a sudden tremour of her frame; as it were through his touch.  To the rest of the letter her judgement stood opposed, save when a sentence here and there reminded her of Captain Baskelett’s insolent sing-song declamation of it:  and that would have turned Sacred Writing to absurdity.

Beauchamp had mentioned Seymour Austin as one to whom he would willingly grant a perusal of the letter.  Mr. Austin came to Mount Laurels about the close of the yachting season, shortly after Colonel Halkett had spent his customary days of September shooting at Steynham.  Beauchamp’s folly was the colonel’s theme, for the fellow had dragged Lord Palmet there, and driven his uncle out of patience.  Mr. Romfrey’s monumental patience had been exhausted by him.  The colonel boiled over with accounts of Beauchamp’s behaviour toward his uncle, and Palmet, and Baskelett, and Mrs. Culling:  how he flew at and worried everybody who seemed to him to have had a hand in the proper chastisement of that man Shrapnel.  That pestiferous letter of Shrapnel’s was animadverted on, of course; and, ’I should like you to have heard it, Austin,’ the colonel said, ’just for you to have a notion of the kind of universal blow-up those men are scheming, and would hoist us with, if they could get a little more blasting-powder than they mill in their lunatic heads.’