She was really grieved to lose him.  Business called him to England.

‘What business can it be, papa?’ she inquired:  and the colonel replied briefly:  ‘Ours.’

Mr. Austin now devoted much of his time to the instruction of her in the ancient life of the Eternal City.  He had certain volumes of Livy, Niebuhr, and Gibbon, from which he read her extracts at night, shunning the scepticism and the irony of the moderns, so that there should be no jar on the awakening interest of his fair pupil and patient.  A gentle cross-hauling ensued between them, that they grew conscious of and laughed over during their peregrinations in and out of Rome:  she pulled for the Republic of the Scipios; his predilections were toward the Rome of the wise and clement emperors.  To Cecilia’s mind Rome rocked at a period so closely neighbouring her decay:  to him, with an imagination brooding on the fuller knowledge of it, the city breathed securely, the sky was clear; jurisprudence, rhetoric, statesmanship, then flourished supreme, and men eminent for culture:  the finest flowers of our race, he thought them:  and he thought their Age the manhood of Rome.

Struck suddenly by a feminine subtle comparison that she could not have framed in speech, Cecilia bowed to his views of the happiness and elevation proper to the sway of a sagacious and magnanimous Imperialism of the Roman pattern:—­he rejected the French.  She mused on dim old thoughts of the gracious dignity of a woman’s life under high governorship.  Turbulent young men imperilled it at every step.  The trained, the grave, the partly grey, were fitting lords and mates for women aspiring to moral beauty and distinction.  Beside such they should be planted, if they would climb!  Her walks and conversations with Seymour Austin charmed her as the haze of a summer evening charms the sight.

Upon the conclusion of her term of exile Cecilia would gladly have remained in Italy another month.  An appointment of her father’s with Mr. Tuckham at Mount Laurels on a particular day she considered as of no consequence whatever, and she said so, in response to a meaningless nod.  But Mr. Austin was obliged to return to work.  She set her face homeward with his immediately, and he looked pleased:  he did not try to dissuade her from accompanying him by affecting to think it a sacrifice:  clearly he knew that to be near him was her greatest delight.

Thus do we round the perilous headland called love by wooing a good man for his friendship, and requiting him with faithful esteem for the grief of an ill-fortuned passion of his youth!

Cecilia would not suffer her fancy to go very far in pursuit of the secret of Mr. Austin’s present feelings.  Until she reached Mount Laurels she barely examined her own.  The sight of the house warned her instantly that she must have a defence:  and then, in desperation but with perfect distinctness, she entertained the hope of hearing him speak the protecting words which could not be broken through when wedded to her consent.