scandal:  he will imagine you as bad in morals as in politics.  And you have lost your friend in Lord Romfrey—­though he shall not be your enemy.  Colonel Halkett and Cecilia called on us at Steynham.  She was looking beautiful; a trifle melancholy.  The talk was of your—­that—­I do not like it, but you hold those opinions—­the Republicanism.  She had read your published letters.  She spoke to me of your sincerity.  Colonel Halkett of course was vexed.

It is the same with all your friends.  She, however, by her tone, led me to think that she sees you as you are, more than in what you do.  They are now in Wales.  They will be in town after Easter.  Then you must expect that her feeling for you will be tried, unless but you will!  You will let me speak to her, Nevil.  My position allows me certain liberties I was previously debarred from.  You have not been so very tender to your Cecilia that you can afford to give her fresh reasons for sorrowful perplexity.  And why should you stand to be blackened by scandalmongers when a few words of mine will prove that instead of weak you have been strong, instead of libertine blameless?  I am not using fine phrases:  I would not.  I would be as thoughtful of you as if you were present.  And for her sake, I repeat, the truth should be told to her.  I have a lock of her hair.’

‘Cecilia’s?  Where?’ said Beauchamp.

‘It is at Steynham.’  Rosamund primmed her lips at the success of her probing touch; but she was unaware of the chief reason for his doting on those fair locks, and how they coloured his imagination since the day of the drive into Bevisham.

‘Now leave me, my dear Nevil,’ she said.  ’Lord Romfrey will soon be here, and it is as well for the moment that you should not meet him, if it can be avoided.’

Beauchamp left her, like a man out-argued and overcome.  He had no wish to meet his uncle, whose behaviour in contracting a misalliance and casting a shadow on the family, in a manner so perfectly objectless and senseless, appeared to him to call for the reverse of compliments.  Cecilia’s lock of hair lying at Steynham hung in his mind.  He saw the smooth flat curl lying secret like a smile.

The graceful head it had fallen from was dimmer in his mental eye.  He went so far in this charmed meditation as to feel envy of the possessor of the severed lock:  passingly he wondered, with the wonder of reproach, that the possessor should deem it enough to possess the lock, and resign it to a drawer or a desk.  And as when life rolls back on us after the long ebb of illness, little whispers and diminutive images of the old joys and prizes of life arrest and fill our hearts; or as, to men who have been beaten down by storms, the opening of a daisy is dearer than the blazing orient which bids it open; so the visionary lock of Cecilia’s hair became Cecilia’s self to Beauchamp, yielding him as much of her as he could bear to think of, for his heart was shattered.