Mr. Austin proposed to Cecilia that they should spend Easter week in
Rome.

Her face lighted and clouded.

‘I should like it,’ she said, negatively.

‘What’s the objection?’

’None, except that Mount Laurels in Spring has grown dear to me; and we have engagements in London.  I am not quick, I suppose, at new projects.  I have ordered the yacht to be fitted out for a cruise in the Mediterranean early in the Summer.  There is an objection, I am sure—­yes; papa has invited Mr. Tuckham here for Easter.’

‘We could carry him with us.’

‘Yes, but I should wish to be entirely under your tutelage in Rome.’

‘We would pair:  your father and he; you and I.’

’We might do that.  But Mr. Tuckham is like you, devoted to work; and, unlike you, careless of Antiquities and Art.’

’He is a hard and serious worker, and therefore the best of companions for a holiday.  At present he is working for the colonel, who would easily persuade him to give over, and come with us.’

‘He certainly does love papa,’ said Cecilia.

Mr. Austin dwelt on that subject.

Cecilia perceived that she had praised Mr. Tuckham for his devotedness to her father without recognizing the beauty of nature in the young man who could voluntarily take service under the elder he esteemed, in simple admiration of him.  Mr. Austin scarcely said so much, or expected her to see the half of it, but she wished to be extremely grateful, and could only see at all by kindling altogether.

‘He does himself injustice in his manner,’ said Cecilia.

‘That has become somewhat tempered,’ Mr. Austin assured her, and he acknowledged what it had been with a smile that she reciprocated.

A rough man of rare quality civilizing under various influences, and half ludicrous, a little irritating, wholly estimable, has frequently won the benign approbation of the sex.  In addition, this rough man over whom she smiled was one of the few that never worried her concerning her hand.  There was not a whisper of it in him.  He simply loved her father.

Cecilia welcomed him to Mount Laurels with grateful gladness.  The colonel had hastened Mr. Tuckham’s visit in view of the expedition to Rome, and they discoursed of it at the luncheon table.  Mr. Tuckham let fall that he had just seen Beauchamp.

‘Did he thank you for his inheritance?’ Colonel Halkett inquired.

‘Not he!’ Tuckham replied jovially.

Cecilia’s eyes, quick to flash, were dropped.

The colonel said:  ’I suppose you told him nothing of what you had done for him?’ and said Tuckham:  ‘Oh no:  what anybody else would have done’; and proceeded to recount that he had called at Dr. Shrapnel’s on the chance of an interview with his friend Lydiard, who used generally to be hanging about the cottage.  ’But now he’s free:  his lunatic wife is dead, and I’m happy to think I was mistaken as to Miss