’I don’t want to make him out worse than he is, my dear.  I own to his gallantry—­in the French sense as well as the English, it seems!  It’s natural that Romfrey should excuse his wife.  She’s another of the women who are crazy about Nevil Beauchamp.  She spoke to me of the “pleasant visit of her French friends,” and would have enlarged on it, but Romfrey stopped her.  By the way, he proposes Captain Baskelett for you, and we’re to look for Baskelett’s coming here, backed by his uncle.  There’s no end to it; there never will be till you’re married:  and no peace for me!  I hope I shan’t find myself with a cold to-morrow.’

The colonel coughed, and perhaps exaggerated the premonitory symptoms of a cold.

‘Italy, papa, would do you good,’ said Cecilia.

‘It might,’ said he.

’If we go immediately, papa; to-morrow, early in the morning, before there is a chance of any visitors coming to the house.’

‘From Bevisham?’

‘From Steynham.  I cannot endure a second persecution.’

‘But you have a world of packing, my dear.’

‘An hour before breakfast will be sufficient for me.’

’In that case, we might be off early, as you say, and have part of the Easter week in Rome.’

‘Mr. Austin wishes it greatly, papa, though he has not mentioned it.’

’Austin, my darling girl, is not one of your impatient men who burst with everything they have in their heads or their hearts.’

‘Oh! but I know him so well,’ said Cecilia, conjuring up that innocent enthusiasm of hers for Mr. Austin as an antidote to her sharp suffering.  The next minute she looked on her father as the key of an enigma concerning Seymour Austin, whom, she imagined, possibly she had not hitherto known at all.  Her curiosity to pierce it faded.  She and her maid were packing through the night.  At dawn she requested her maid to lift the window-blind and give her an opinion of the weather.  ‘Grey, Miss,’ the maid reported.  It signified to Cecilia:  no one roaming outside.

The step she was taking was a desperate attempt at a cure; and she commenced it, though sorely wounded, with pity for Nevil’s disappointment, and a singularly clear-eyed perception of his aims and motives.—­’I am rich, and he wants riches; he likes me, and he reads my weakness.’—­Jealousy shook her by fits, but she had no right to be jealous, nor any right to reproach him.  Her task was to climb back to those heavenly heights she sat on before he distracted her and drew her down.

Beauchamp came to a vacated house that day.

CHAPTER XLVI

AS IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN FORESEEN

It was in Italy that Cecilia’s maiden dreams of life had opened.  She hoped to recover them in Italy, and the calm security of a mind untainted.  Italy was to be her reviving air.